Much of the COVID-19 recovery period for the box office has been a mixed bag, and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend was no different as overall grosses improved from last year but remain well below what the January holiday brought prior to the pandemic.
The estimated final overall total for the four-day weekend is $127 million, approximately 49% above the $85 million grossed last year. But it’s also 32% below the $205 million grossed on the holiday weekend in January 2020 less than two months before the pandemic closed theaters.
The year-over-year improvement came from a mix of solid performance from holdover films combined with some modest contributions from new releases. On MLK weekend in 2022, more than half of the weekend’s meager gross came from the $33.8 million opening of Paramount’s “Scream” revival and the $24.6 million grossed by the wildly popular “Spider-Man: No Way Home” in its fifth weekend. With the film industry still tentative about releasing films in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, there were no other new films outside of “Scream” to bring people to theaters.
This past weekend, by contrast, had a top five that consisted of a globally popular blockbuster sequel (“Avatar: The Way of Water“), a horror film and an animated family film that both have stellar word of mouth (“M3GAN” and “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” respectively), and a new dramedy starring Tom Hanks and action film starring Gerard Butler to attract different sections of the older moviegoing populace (“A Man Called Otto” and “Plane”).
While “Otto” and “Plane” weren’t exceptionally strong performers, each opening in the $12-$15 million range, they still brought in demographics that were barely showing up last winter amid COVID fears. “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is still behind the pace set last year by Illumination’s “Sing 2” but had a better MLK weekend with $19 million, a sign that its acclaim among families and general audiences alike is giving it legs.
“M3GAN” is also proving that horror isn’t as consistently frontloaded as it used to be, dropping less than 50% in its second weekend and putting itself in position to be the next film in the genre to gross over $100 million domestic. And “Avatar 2″… well, “Avatar 2” is going to hit $2 billion worldwide in the next week or so. Enough said.
Ask any movie theater exec what they want to see from the film industry in 2023, and what they will most likely tell you is they want more films that cater to a wider range of demographics and tastes. The numbers seen this weekend show that there’s considerable progress on that front.
But what is still missing from the January box office is a strong No. 1 hit, either a four-quadrant blockbuster like “Bad Boys for Life,” which opened to $73 million on MLK weekend in 2020, or an Oscar contender like “Hidden Figures” in 2017, or “1917” in 2020, both of which earned more than $20 million on the weekend as they released nationwide.
It’s possible that a studio may set a four-quadrant film capable of opening to $40 million or more for release on MLK weekend in the years to come, but the days of Oscar contenders with potential for wide appeal waiting until January for release are likely in the past. With the ratings for the Oscars and the Golden Globes shrinking, there’s less of an incentive to wait until the new year to release a prestige film rather than in the fall or during the holidays, and many of those prestige films aren’t selling tickets like they used to no matter when they come out.
Unless horror films like “M3GAN” can consistently fill the niche left behind by the flailing prestige market, a major section of MLK weekend and the early-year box office as a whole will be gone for good.
