New Mutants and New Films. What did you see this past week?

Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.

I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...

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Mulan for $29.99

by Nathaniel R

The Mouse House is tired of waiting for movie theaters to open. They've announced that Mulan will be going direct to Disney+ for Labor Day Weekend. It will also be in movie theaters that weekend in some regions. The catch is that it won't be free on the streaming service that you already pay for. It will cost $29.99 to watch (for an undisclosed length of time). This is bad news for those of us who love to go to movies and watch epic things on big screens in dark cavernous rooms with strangers and hate the motion smoothing on modern televisions. It's good news for parents (at least at this shut-in moment in history) who would likely spend more than $30 to take their kids out to this movie in a normal year. 

Given that Mulan cost hundreds of millions to make and Disney's "event" movies normally make $1 billion plus at the theatrical box office globally they'll need a lot of $29.99 purchases to reach that number. What do you make of this news? End times (as some exhibitors think) or just a minor shifting of the sands?

Box Office crashing during the pandemic

By the looks of the weekend box office -- the single worst in 20 years -- you weren't at the movies this weekend. Every movie suffered a massive drop but for those which were still in the process of adding theaters and they didn't score with strong per screen averages. Here's how the current releases fared...

Weekend Box Office March 13th-15th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
Onward	Hope Gap
1 ONWARD  $10.5 (60.8) --down 73%	1 PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE $178k  (cum. $3.7) - down 66%  TOP TEN LIST ★
2 🔺  I STILL BELIEVE  $9.5 *new*	2 🔺  HOPE GAP $55k (cum. $99k) up  79% REVIEW

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Onward, First Cow, to the Weekend Box Office.

What did you see this weekend? Pixar's Onward was the big winner with a $40 million haul. The hot ticket in platform release was Kelly Reichardt's First Cow which had the weekend's highest per screen average at just 4 theaters.  

Weekend Box Office March 6th-8th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
Onward	First Cow
1 🔺 ONWARD  $40 *new*	1 🔺 PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE $540k on 334 screens (cum. $3.3) TOP TEN LIST ★
2  THE INVISIBLE MAN  $15.1 (cum. $52.6) *new* REVIEW	2 🔺  BAAGHI 3 $475k  *new*

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Weekend Box Office Actuals

Oops. sorry these are so late. What did you see over this past weekend? 

Weekend Box Office February 28th-March 1st (ACTUALS) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1 🔺 INVISIBLE MAN  $28.2 *new* REVIEW	1 🔺  EMMA $1.1 (cum. $1.4)  EMMAS OF YORE

2 SONIC THE HEDGEHOG $16.2 (cum. $128.5	2 🔺 PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE $748k (cum. $2.4) TOP TEN LIST ★

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