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How important is the opening week to a movie’s total box office?

11 June '18 6 Comments on How important is the opening week to a movie’s total box office?

I was contacted by a reader who asked about the importance of the opening weekend as a percentage of the total amount a movie will gross.  Specifically, they asked about Black Panther, a movie which has stayed in cinemas for longer than most and for which the high point of press attention seemed to come a few weeks after its initial release.  “Does this mean that it made more money in weeks three and four than week one?” they asked. The significance of the opening week’s gross is a great topic to study, so I took a look.  I built a database of all movies released domestically (i.e. in American and Canadian cinemas) in the twenty years between 1998 and 2017, inclusive.  I then looked at the weekly box office gross (i.e. the money the cinema collected, before any deductions such as tax or the cinema cut).

Is week one often a weak one?

Across all 10,719 movies I studied, just under half had their highest grossing week in the first week of release. To some readers, this may seem strange.  We often hear about the opening week or weekend being key in the performance of a movie and yet the data below may not show as a strong an effect as some expected.  The reason for this apparent disconnect is that not all films have the same experience.  The big Hollywood studio tentpole movies only really get one week in which they can monopolise the media and cinema screens. If we narrow our focus to only the top 50 grossing films of each year, this pattern is clear.  Nine out of ten had their highest grossing week in their first week.

How much smaller is week two compared with week one?

Across all movies which were on release for at least two weeks, the average week two gross was half the gross of week one.  Only 27% of movies made more in week two than they did in week one.

Fast burning vs slow release

As we have seen, most movies perform best in their first week.  However, this does not mean that the subsequent weeks are not important to their overall total gross. Below are three movies which stayed on release for a long time and followed the typical pattern of earning most of their money in the first few weeks.  Gladiator reached half of its eventual domestic gross in week 3 of release, despite still being in cinemas for over a year.  Likewise, Moulin Rouge reached its midpoint in week 4 and Get Out in week 2. Below are three more movies with long cinema lives, but which fit a different recoupment pattern.  These three have a ‘long tail’, meaning that the later weeks were relatively more lucrative than is typical for movies.  It took Searching For Sugarman 13 weeks to reach half of its eventual total gross. Silver Linings Playbook took 11 weeks and The Piano Teacher took 9.

Black Panther

The original question was about the progress of Black Panther.  The movie was released in the States on 16th February and has grossed just under $700 million domestically so far.  It reached half that figure in its second week, and week two’s gross was 49% of that of week one.  This means that it fits the more typical model for a studio tentpole rather than a ‘long tail’ release, slowly picking up steam.

Notes

The data for today’s research came from Box Office Mojo, The Numbers and IMDb.

Further reading

If you want to know more about how the box office income is distributed then you may enjoy reading the following articles:

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Comments

6 comments
  1. Neil Hetherington

    Hi. As with all the previous posts this article is a most interesting and edifying read . thanks for the mail.

  2. Great analysis! In some of the work we’ve done, we see that distribution strategy affects this quite a bit, so movies that are opening in select cities and not in wide release during Oscar season late in the year can skew the numbers a bit. Hidden Figures is a good example of a movie with a very long tail after a limited release. Week 1 release volumes are also a function of genres, with Action/Adventure films earning almost 50% of their domestic BO revenue in week 1 and musicals/family films having a smaller week 1, closer to 40%.

    The most interesting story of the past few months was The Greatest Showman, which was carried by its musical fan base after a slow opening week. But it was also helped by the seasonal spike in attendance during the last two weeks of the year.

    Thanks!

  3. Hi Stephen
    This is REALY interesting article, However, you didn’t mention the importance of the opening weekend and the next few weeks is that exhibitors retain a far lesser share of BO (as low as 10%) than they do if the film plays on. And if the BO of that film isn’t sufficient in the opening weeks, they will dump it in favour of another that they hope will generate a higher BO .
    All best.
    David Japp

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