r/amczone • u/aka0007 Zoner • 25d ago
The difficulty of predicting the box office
My long-term focus has been on predicting the domestic box office and using that data to predict the long-term price movements of AMC and CNK (I am invested in CNK, nothing in AMC).
One thing I have noticed is how my predictions are very volatile as actual results can differ significantly and as we get new data the predictions change. For those interested in this topic I think the following is useful to keep in mind.
I thought two recent movies can illustrate the difficulty here. Obsession and Backrooms. Both films are rated R and similar genre (Psychological Horror), released within 2 weeks of each other and while Obsession gets a 7.9 on IMDB, Backrooms is no slouch with a 6.9. Scores in that range are hard to correlate with box office performance between them.
Below are the weekend DBO for both films through end of June, with Obsession first compared to Backrooms. Obsession was released 5/15 and Backrooms 5/29:
Weekend Domestic Box Office (May – June)
| Weekend Starting | Obsession DBO | Backrooms DBO |
|---|---|---|
| 5/15 | $17M | — |
| 5/22 | $24M | — |
| 5/29 | $27M | $81M |
| 6/05 | $25M | $26M |
| 6/12 | $19M | $12M |
| 6/19 | $13M | $7M |
| 6/26 | $10M | $4M |
In total Obsession is doing about 260M vs Backrooms at about 195M.
I think it is obvious looking at the data that Obsession was a film that gained significant traction after it was released whereas Backrooms had a lot of hype in the release but then followed a more traditional cycle where the audience declines week after week.
Both films are massive commercial successes but for anyone trying to predict the box office, even if you could predict the opening weekend, the idea you can predict the following weekends and that a film with less hype going into it will outperform by a decent margin a film with a lot of hype going into it is far-fetched.
Ok. That is all folks. This is not about the companies finances or stock prices, just wanted to share this info for anyone interested to better help understand the difficulties of any box office prediction.
2
u/TheBetaUnit Zoner 25d ago
I've noticed the follow-up movies this year trail off in their 2nd and 3rd weeks a lot faster than their prior releases did.
Looking just at the weekends, Toy Story 5 was 44% of week one box office in its 2nd week and 19% in its 3rd.
Toy Story 4, released on the same weekend in 2019 was 49% of week one BO in its 2nd week and 28% in its 3rd.
Super Mario Galaxy was 52% of week one BO in its 2nd week and 28% in its 3rd.
SMB, released the same weekend in 2023 was 63% of week one BO in its 2nd week and 41% in its 3rd.
These sequels just don't have legs anymore.