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Source: Variety
Historically, the weekend during which the Super Bowl, the final professional football game of the yearly season, takes place (usually the first or second weekend of February) has rarely been an especially lucrative time period for major film studios. The reason could not be more obvious: most people are either watching the big game or making preparations to watch the big game, so there usually isn’t much time available to them that would allow them to visit their nearest cineplex and purchase a ticket for whatever is playing there. With that said, it’s not uncommon for some studios to offer counterprogramming to those who don’t particularly care for sports, and while such films don’t usually see especially high weekend grosses, they may serve as a means of escape for anyone who doesn’t have much interest in football. This year though, whatever counterprogramming was released into theaters this Super Bowl weekend was not nearly enough to attract the eyeballs needed to avert sinking to a broken record, that being the lowest grossing Super Bowl weekend in decades (with the exception of those during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).
Throughout the three-day period between Friday, February 9th and Sunday, February 11th, the nationwide box office generated a revenue total of only $42 million, a number that some would consider disappointing for even a single major film release, let alone the entirety of the industry. For comparison, last year’s Super Bowl weekend was able to earn $53 million in total ticket sales; in the years prior to the start of the pandemic, those numbers were $84 million in 2020 and $75 million in 2019. As one can see, none of these periods were especially busy for the box office, but it’s quite telling how this most recent Super Bowl weekend saw an intake of barely half of what had been earned just over five years ago. Interestingly, the same cannot be said about the big reason why so few people went out to theaters this past weekend, as Super Bowl LVIII saw a completely different record broken: the most watched telecast of all time with a total of 123.4 million viewers tuning in to see the Kansas City Chiefs go head to head with the San Francisco 49ers. While the fact that people tend to avoid film-going in favor of the Super Bowl on a regular basis was already fairly obvious, the sharp contrast of the difference in box office records broken by each entity only makes the fact even more so.
So what did the few people who were willing to attend a screening at their nearest theater have to look forward to? For the majority of ticket-buyers, the preferred choice was a holdover from the previous weekend, Universal and Apple’s spy action-comedy “Argylle”, although even that film isn’t benefiting much from the lack of competition. Having reportedly cost around $200 million (and that’s before marketing costs), “Argylle” already got off to an underwhelming start last week with an opening weekend gross of $17.5 million, enough to give it the #1 spot but hardly enough to suggest that it will be able to recoup its budget through theatrical sales alone. It doesn’t look like word of mouth is strong enough to keep the film afloat for much longer either; during its second weekend, “Argylle”earned roughly $6.5 million, a drop of about 62% from what it had earned just a week prior. Although this may not be the steepest week-to-week decline a film can experience at the box office, it’s still steep enough to imply that audiences aren’t as enthusiastic about the film as the studio that made it would desire. With its current domestic grosses sitting at around $28.6 million and contributing to a worldwide gross of $59.7 million, it would take a true miracle to prevent “Argylle” from becoming the year’s first major box office bomb.
Faring ever worse at the box office this weekend was a new release from Focus Features (a subsidiary of Comcast, which also owns Universal), Zelda Williams’ directorial debut “Lisa Frankenstein”. Normally, this romantic horror would be a perfect fit for the demographic that has historically shown little interest in the Super Bowl – i.e. teenage girls and young adult women – but even they didn’t seem to care enough about “Lisa Frankenstein” to check it out when it opened this past Friday. In total, the film earned about $3.8 million over the course of the three-day period, a noticeably abysmal number for a film given a wide release in around 3,100 theaters across the nation. The one upside: “Lisa Frankenstein” only cost $13 million to produce (a substantial fraction of what it took to make “Argylle”), so even if this film does ultimately underperform, it won’t be too big of a loss for Focus Features.
Following behind “Argylle” and “Lisa Frankenstein” were more holdovers from the past few weeks, with the likes of MGM’s “The Beekeeper” maintaining a spot in the top ten for its fifth consecutive weekend and Warner Bros’ “Wonka” achieving the same for its ninth weekend. Though word of mouth can be credited to some degree for these films’ long-term prominence (“Wonka” has proven especially lucky given its recent entry into the top 10 highest-grossing 2023 releases worldwide), the fact of the matter is there just haven’t been enough big draws to attract film-goers to come out over the past few weeks, with this most recent Super Bowl weekend being no exception. “That’s extremely quiet for any weekend of the year, including Super Bowl weekend,” claims Franchise Entertainment Research head David A. Gross, whose company specializes in the analysis of box office performance. “‘Dune 2’ cannot come fast enough.”
Gross, of course, is referring to Warner Bros’ “Dune: Part II”, which is currently planned to come out on March 1st. Though the likes of Paramount’s :Bob Marley: One Love” and Sony’s “Madame Web” are also coming out in the meantime, none of these films are expected to earn any grosses that their respective studios (and the rest of the industry for that matter) can find impressive. According to many, it won’t be until “Dune: Part II’ that the box office will start to truly pick up, and even then, it will have to do a lot in order to make up for what has so far been a fairly dissatisfactory year for the domestic box office.
