“The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.” - Bob Iger
The final weekend for the 2023 box office proved spectacular in terms of hitting the estimations. Ambler’s Cut was off by a mere $783,853 when accumulating the total revenue of the top 5 box office films. Significant and focused calculation went into our forecasting to achieve this number.
Warner Bros.’ "The Color Purple" was released the Monday before the December 29 weekend. In the days in between, the film experienced an odd tumble. The day after its premiere, it fell 61.5%. On December 27th and 28th, the film earned roughly $3.5 million each night. Going into the weekend, it increased its theater count by roughly 60 theaters, reaching 3,203. We presumed that "The Color Purple" would maintain a $3-3.8 million range for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, landing our estimation on $9.7 million. We were off by a little over $1.0 million. However, "The Color Purple" was failing in terms of word of mouth and did not capture Warner Bros.’ attention as their most precious project going into that weekend. It felt as though WB studios had given up on pushing it. Another reason is its close alignment with the other WB film, "Wonka." Both are family-friendly musicals, and at the end of the day, "Wonka" was the winner. "The Color Purple" failed to gain traction as the market was already flooded with similar options. It saw its target audience during the front-loaded first two days. From then on, the film was just not good enough to save itself.
Warner Bros. wanted to hedge their bets this past weekend as they poured more attention into their films "Wonka" and "Aquaman 2." "Wonka" was bound to win this weekend's box office, securing $22.5 million, respectively. Solid IP mixed with family-friendly themes made this film a great horse to bet on. Any box office researcher could see that the holiday holdover market looked to be led by the third frame of "Wonka." It just came down to its final number.
"Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom" had hoped to appeal to die-hard fans for its sophomore showing. The film actually performed better than what Ambler’s Cut expected, achieving $18.3 million. Here is the thing: "Aquaman 2" and its overall performance has not been good, but it has not been all that terrible when looking at the year from a retrospective standpoint. It may have dipped on its second weekend, but a 34% week-on-week drop is not terrible. Recall "The Marvels" performance!
Illumination's “Migration" has been better than expected at the box office, landing in third place. Our prediction for the film was off by a mere $1.01 million! It has given hope to animated films at the box office, and we hope Sony Pictures Animation and other studios take note. Looking at 2024’s slate of animated features, many studios are playing it safe and sending the films right to streaming.
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