A films opening weekend has become even more important in recent years as similar to in the US media channels (radio/TV/internet) will report the news that a film opened in top spot. A films opening is very important for a distributor as normally a film will earn a third of its total box office in those first “3 days”.
But what isn’t reported is that the box office for many of these films has been inflated by sometimes up to a week of paid previews.
It has been a regular occurrence for distributors to open films on Wednesday/Thursday to give their film a 4/5 day opening weekend.
Distributors would often do paid previews ahead of a film’s release which used to be a couple of performances the weekend before but that changed dramatically when Warner Bros released the first Harry Potter film in 2001 holding all day previews over the weekend before which helped Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone open with £16.2m with £6.6m coming from the previews.
Since then distributors have regularly held Sat/Sun previews for their family films the weekend before its release that have been added to their openings.
In May this year Universal opened Bad Neighbours on May 3rd with its box office Sat-Thurs included within its opening weekend giving it a 9 day opening. The film topped the chart for its opening weekend with £8.4m but it would have also topped the chart the previous weekend taking £2.5m in two days. It became Universal’s third biggest opening in the UK behind Ted (£9.3m) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (£10.4m) both having far less days of previews, the later released 10 years ago when ticket prices were less than half what they are today.
On July 10th Paramount release Transformers: Age of Extinction the day after 20th Century Fox release How to Train Your Dragon 2 (in England and Wales, it opens in Scotland and Ireland on June 27th) but both films will have a 9 day opening weekend.
How to Train Your Dragon 2 had Father’s Day previews on June 15th (it took £517,294) it will also have previews this weekend on Sat/Sun and the following weekend Fri/Sat/Sun before opening on July 11th.
Transformers: Age of Extinction will have previews from Saturday July 5th -10th giving it a 9 day opening weekend. (The TV spot for it says everywhere from July 5th no mention of previews from that date so its weekend box office should be calculated from that day as its opening weekend).
Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened 29th June 2011 having a 5 day weekend opening with £10.7m (£4.2m in previews on Weds/Thurs). How to Train Your Dragon opened 31st March 2010 with Sat/Sun previews the weekend before with £4.8m.
These paid previews are artificially inflating a film’s opening weekend making it impossible to compare one film against each other. It also means that these films suffer a massive drop in their second weekends.
Opening weekend figures are much more important to the studios in the US and it is interesting that they don’t have this practice of weekend before previews added to a film’s opening which normally starts with late shows on Thursday night for films that open on a Friday.
Over the next couple of years studios are releasing many high profile and franchise releases many of these are opening against each over the same weekend and extending a film’s opening weekend is one way for them to get a foot up on the competition. Opening a film on Wednesday gives a film a 5 day opening but has its drawbacks being Orange Wednesday halving the earnings of a film on that day.
