There’s only room for one killer clown at the top of box office.
via: Deadline
In one of the year’s second-best triumphs for indie genre cinema after NEON’s Longlegs, Cineverse’s under $5M investment, Terrifier 3, is screaming to an estimated $18.3M+ 3-day after an $8.2M Friday, $5.9M Saturday and $4.2M Sunday. That Sunday hold -30% is on account of the Indigenous Peoples holiday. The threequel received a B CinemaScore, which is high praise from the moviegoer pollster as it doesn’t hand out a lot of As to horror titles.
The jaw dropping awe is how this movie, which was largely marketed to Cineverse’s sole Bloody Disgusting fanbase and 80M streaming subscribers across 30 channels for under $1M, broke out to bigger numbers. Unlike some of the other wide entries this weekend, iSpot doesn’t show any national spots for Terrifier 3.
Many studios have tried this low P&A spend, laser focused demo marketing approach and just seem to come up short at the box office. What’s the secret to success when it comes to this approach in order to achieve a high margin success at the box office?
Says Cineverse Boss Chris McGurk, “You have to be incredibly creative and different; you can’t downsize a traditional studio playbook. You have to go to extraordinary lengths, and you need to get creative.”
“There’s a wave going on here,” compliments one industry movie marketing maven, “Movies like Terrifier 3, the Crunchyroll films, and even last year’s Godzilla Minus One; these films can find their target audience on social, spend very little and effectively convince them to spend their money to come out to theaters.”
“Traditional movie marketing is getting lost in the shuffle,” adds the source. Godzilla Minus One was able to reach $56.4M stateside off a P&A that was under $5M, Deadline understands.
Cineverse hasn’t made big splashes in the theatrical space that much. They had the 2013 small indie movie about foster kids, Short Term 12, which launched star Brie Larson and that pic’s director Destin Daniel Cretton to greater Marvel Studios heights, but the movie only grossed $1M. In the wake of that movie’s shortcoming at the B.O., Cineverse built itself into a niche demo streamer, FAST channel empire and ad tech business.
Some of the stunts for Terrifier 3 included teaming with promo partners like Venmo and Call of Duty. That videogame has a swatch of Halloween characters, and Terrifier 3‘s Art the Clown was one of them. There was a fake outdoor campaign and an Art the Clown street team in NYC. There was also a marketing partnership with Fandango.
Terrifier 2 developed quite the cult following in its theatrical and post-theatrical, and what’s going on here with Terrifier 3 is one of the oldest tricks in the Hollywood rulebook: noticing the popularity of IP in the home ancillaries of one sequel, and doubling down on the next installment, read Austin Powers 1 & 2, and John Wick 1 and 2. Cineverse saw a tripling in its Scream Box streaming subs after Terrifier 2 was released. They further expanded the audience, particularly Latino and Hispanic moviegoers who showed up at 48% to Caucasian’s 34%, 10% Black, 2% Asian and 5% Native American/other.
This is a great win for McGurk whose last streak of No. 1 movies was during his reign as MGM Vice Chairman and COO during the early aughts with titles such as Die Another Day, Legally Blonde, the Amityville Horror reboot starring Ryan Reynolds, Jeepers Creepers, Barbershop and even the Steve Martin-led Pink Panther (which he developed, but opened after his departure from the studio). He cites Terrifier 3 as by far the best box office ratio result in regards to P&A spend during the course of his career.
PostTrak audiences gave Terrifier 3 four stars with a 76% positive and 59% definite recommend. Male leaning at 61% with 18-24 year olds being the largest demo at 37%. Terrifier 3 played evenly across the country, but best in East, South Central and West. AMC Burbank has the highest gross for the pic with $42K through Saturday.
PostTrak observed that under 25 moviegoers went in groups to see Terrifier 3: 19% took one friend, while 30% went with two to four friends. Sixty-two percent said they’d tell their friends to see this threequel in a theater, no matter what. Big walk-up business with 55% of Terrifier 3‘s crowd buying their tickets on the same day they watched it. Among the reasons why people went to this clown movie versus the other one on the marquee: 52% said it was part of a genre they love, while 40% said Terrifier 3 is part of a franchise they love.
What’s next for Cineverse? Given how they’ve been able to dynamite a theatrical audience on shoestring budgets with genre fare, there’s more in store. They’ve figured out a way to leverage their infrastructure of podcasts and channels, and the hope is to extend those superpowers to other studios looking to reach greater audiences. “We can market movies in a smarter way, I think we just proved the concept on this movie,” McGurk tells Deadline this AM.
Warner Bros’ second weekend of Joker: Folie à Deux is posting a -81% freefall with $7.055M in third place per Warner Bros this morning. That’s the absolute worst hold for a DC character movie in the history of the brand on the big screen. Triple note, James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios did not steer or shepherd Joker 2. The Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga R-rated musical got kicked out of No. 2 by a cartoon robot, DreamWorks Animation/Universal’s Wild Robot ($13.45M third weekend). This drop isn’t a shocker as we saw Joker 2 doing worse than the second frame of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s The Marvels (-78%) which was the worst hold for that Disney label’s movies.
Joker 2‘s second weekend drop is steeper than the previous worst drop for a DC character movie, summer 2023’s The Flash (-73%). It’s also more severe than the second weekend of 2021’s The Suicide Squad (-72%) which remember had a theatrical day-and-date release with HBO Max; those dynamic distributed titles always tumbled in their second weekend. The only nice thing to say here about Joker 2 is that it’s second weekend is more than Wonder Woman 1984‘s second weekend ($5.4M) which of course was due to theater closures during Covid, and it’s better than the second weekend of Jonah Hex ($1.6M) which owns the worst opening ever for a DC movie at $5.3M.
Joker 2 had the Imax screens, hence $800K for the weekend for a running cume for the large format exhibitor of $6.2M. Global stands at $165.3M through this weekend. The Marvels, the comp we keep using, ended its global run at $206.1M.
While Joker 2 is flopping, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, conversely, is a huge win for the studio, and has zoomed past the $400 million mark globally to finish Sunday with $420.3 million in ticket sales. Its foreign tally is $144.7 million.
Exhibitors scream they need more product, and indeed they got it this weekend with a slew of prestige awards season contender wide entries. But they didn’t find sizable audiences: Sony’s Saturday Night ($3.4M), Focus Features’ Piece by Piece ($3.8M), and Briarcliff Entertainment’s The Apprentice ($1.58M). Here’s what’s heart-wrenching: These are critically acclaimed movies which are vying for a shot this awards season, which had an immense amount of support from their respective studios, further bolstered by fall film festival launches, as well as wide PR support from filmmaker/casts, and they’re just not clicking. Each of these studios believed in these movies as theatrical plays. Hopefully their commercial results here won’t tarnish their awards season runway. Juxtapose this to Netflix, which will be trumpeting their wares Emilia Pérez and the Angelina Jolie-led Maria all the way to Oscar night, March 2, 2025. The box office for these movies won’t be reported, as the streamer gives them limited qualifying runs, and therefore their patina won’t be impacted.
“Streaming has just crushed the prospects for these types of movies,” said one rival studio executive about the misfiring going on here for Saturday Night (80% RT critics, B+ CinemaScore), Piece by Piece (81% RT critics, solid A CinemaScore) and Apprentice (77% RT critics, B- CinemaScore). At the same time, look at the rabbit which Searchlight pulled out of its hat in the bawdy Emma Stone, ultimate 4x Oscar winning Poor Things (which finaled at $34.5M stateside, $117.6M worldwide) last year. What gives? Each of this weekend’s entires, unfortunately, has their own set of mild acne, if not worse.
Note these movies are going earlier in the fall versus later in the holiday season due to the crowded field.
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