WHY SOLO’S FAILURE IS SUCH A BIG DEAL
Underwhelming performance indicates Hollywood may be in for a poor box office this summer season, writes Steven Zeitchik.
Solo: A Star Wars Story did not do well last weekend. As Yoda might say, there was no doing, and no trying.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the movie barely grossed $29 million (all figures U.S.) — a paltry figure that represented a 65 per cent plummet from the week before.
The drop would have been bad enough — any second-weekend slip of greater than 60 per cent isn’t good, and the 65 per cent threshold really isn’t good. But Solo’s slow second weekend came with an added mark of notoriety: No major movie opened against it. The Star Wars instalment brought out an audience only one-third the size of its opening weekend, and there wasn’t even anything new to divert moviegoers’ attention.
That’s surely a bad omen for those affiliated with the Star Wars franchise. But it’s also a bad omen for a much larger group: the rest of Hollywood.
If you’ve followed entertainment business news in recent years, you’ve heard a lot about the domestic opening weekend — who won it, who lost it, what records were set, what movies made us stay home.
But a more nuanced analysis looks not just at winners and losers that first weekend but another metric, that of the second-weekend drop — that is, the comparative loss in dollars in a film’s second weekend of release. Those drops can tell a larger tale about a film’s staying power — even, sometimes, of the current appeal of movie-going to the American consumer.
When a major release has a box office drop of less than 50 per cent on the second weekend, that means the word of mouth of is good, people are coming.
On the other hand, when there’s a big drop — usually above 60 per cent — it indicates the opposite. A big drop with no competition is a true red flag for the box office, just as a low drop is a mark of great health. Over the past few years this ratio has proved remarkably accurate in predicting the overall box office of the spring-summer period.
Only in two of the last six years did these red-flaggers outnumber the low-droppers in the spring-summer period: in 2017 (thanks to Transformers: The Last Knight, War of the Planet of the Apes and The Fate of the Furious) and 2014 (thanks to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Transformers: Age of Extinction).
It’s not tough to see why this dropping ratio is so indicative of the larger state of movie-going. If audiences are quickly losing interest in films after they open and are failing to head into those theatres even when there’s nothing else taking their attention, they’re just not into movies that month, or season.
If movies aren’t dropping, that means that they’re holding moviegoers’ attention. Fans are coming out in the second and even third week, making up for movies they missed opening weekend or returning to watch them again.
And that’s where Solo becomes a concern — not just for Disney and Lucasfilm studios but for the health of Hollywood as a whole.
Coming into last weekend, the spring-summer period had seen no low-droppers or red-flaggers. Every major release had either dropped between 50 per cent and 60 per cent in its second weekend, or, if it dropped more than 60 per cent, it was because another big movie opened and took its spot. Now, at the beginning of June, Hollywood has a red-flagger, a movie that dropped at least 60 per cent with nothing else opening against it. And that means box office as a whole is suddenly looking not so healthy.
Ah, but what about the success of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, you ask? Each has grossed more than $600 million. And it’s true — both have buoyed the box office, offsetting disappointments such as A Wrinkle in Time. Sleeper hit A Quiet Place hasn’t hurt, either. Box office year-to-date is up seven per cent.
But don’t read too much into those numbers. Last year at this time, box office was also up compared with the year before, by nearly three per cent. But by the end of August things had cratered, and overall box office was down more than six per cent. The spring-summer period is when Hollywood makes — or loses — its fortune.
So it will be up to a host of franchise sequels coming up to ensure that the black ink doesn’t turn red, as it did last summer. Those include Ocean’s 8, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Mission: Impossible — Fallout, all landing in the weeks ahead.
Hollywood has been desperately trying to avoid a repeat of 2017. The numbers for Solo signal some rockiness, and then some, for the Star Wars franchise. It just could be bad news for everyone else too.