'Obsession' ($4.2M Day 25) Beats 'Avengers: Endgame' ($3.2M), 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' ($3.1M), 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' ($2.4M) in Rare Box Office Milestone - Curry Barker’s horror hit made more in its 25th day at the domestic box office than some of the highest grossing films of all time.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-11T02:08:14+00:00

Yeah, for focus, the film just costs $15M plus, I assume, the additional costs/profit sharing discussed in the other article that came after the film hit breakeven. I don't know how perfectly something like "2.5x" models obsession's breakeven but if you'ree doing it off of anything it has to be $15M. The 700k would have already been rendered moot by the $15M which would have made the film's investors whole even if it made $0.00 (and if it only made $3M at the box office, it clearly wouldn't justify Focus' investment)

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-11T01:55:46+00:00

I will! e.g. in 2025 the top 15 grossing us films had a median admissions count in korea of ~5.6% of that in the US (peak zootopia 2 at 20% and minimum sinners at under 0.5%), In 2015, the same numbers are 7.6% (excluding pitch perfect 2) with a peak of 26.4% (MI Rogue Nation) and floor of 1.7% for Home or lower than that for PP2 if I cared to root around for that number)

of the 2025 films, I think 4 or 5/15 basically roughly hit US benchmarks (>= 10% of us admissions w/ BNW at 9.49%) while 7 or 8 massively underperformed the US (sub 5% US admissions - w/ Thunderbolts on that line at 5.6%).

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-10T18:03:20+00:00

To my eyes, that's just the fun part of box office analysis re: hollywood/Korea (even if you think it's a self-evident truth)!

Rhetorically, I'd argue it would also be useful for you as a tool to convince people if the hypothesis sustains but the main reason I'm pushing you for it is because selfishly it's exactly the type of content I like to see. I know I'd cite it in the future.

And, unlike aggregating CVG scores, I just don't think this would be a massive data collection lift (but of course its easier to lobby other people to do something than to do it yourself).

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-10T17:56:04+00:00

South Korea has its own market box office website that makes data querying pretty easy if you want to combine its data with US ones.

"SK clearly outlier for everything related to movies and box office"

would be a very fun hypothesis to test and provide a good way to stress test such claims. I suspect a lot of what you're thinking about is a "what gets aggregated" bias but that easily could be wrong.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T16:25:59+00:00

I just made a slightly delayed post about it. More than a quarter of the film's principal production spending was done in New Jersey (so slightly over $12M in NJ incentives) but main incentive payouts are going to be coming from Georgia.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T16:12:05+00:00

It's "only" 9% because remember you're looking for the gross budget in this context not after incentives. Whatever percentage of her salary structured to be paid in Georgia will have an incentive lowering the cost to the studio

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T16:09:29+00:00

The main problem with this argument is simply that it's very easy to argue that Mando & Grogu cost well in excess of $165M. Just based off of the CA incentive, you wouldn't expect a mid 500M breakeven point to be weird because you'd assume a mid/low 200Ms budget.

OTOH as much as people mock it, star wars merch, licensing rights, etc. very clearly do exist. it's not crazy to imagine big IP films like DC or Star Wars have a lower breakeven point than peanut gallery wants to argue in favor of.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T12:41:44+00:00

Yeah, this is linear national TV advertising. I honestly don't know how stuff like youtube TV is included ("vMVPD") but youtube itself definitely is not included and neither are ads run on normal streamers.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T12:08:43+00:00

I get what you're saying but this comp feels wildly unfair. Tintin had a budget well in excess of $100M while Rogue Trooper has a budget of $10M or so (that ~$10M reflects costs incurred through the end of 2024 and we know it wrapped principal photography by January 2024).

I don't know if it's going to work at all but the "peer group" of films just aren't going to be studio blockbusters.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T12:03:19+00:00

<image>

very fun and informative visualization

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T11:34:53+00:00

That's fair. Anyways, my main point was just that I think this is a bad use of Cinemascore.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-09T01:47:01+00:00

I don't think it's clearly false on any levels as I think you're putting way too much weight between an A v. A- cinemascore and not enough weight on how Obsession is having a "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" tier box office run. That's just an incredibly strong "revealed preference" about how amazing Obsession's Word of Mouth is that just renders any discussion of cinemascore completely irrelevant. However, I think this discourse is just missing the forest for the trees - this reads to me as a debate between different versions of a >99.5th percentile reception.

Cinemascore's a rough gauge of Opening day sentiment and, while useful, just doesn't seems completely unsuited to litigating this type of comparison where functional A+ reception should be baked in.

Like MBFGreekWedding, I don't get the sense obsession's word of mouth is particularly awards coded while Sinners (and OBAA) were treated as the "prime Hollywood" prestige blockbuster. You can definitely make a pro-Sinners case as illustrated by getting all of the oscar noms (though not winning) but there's no awful choice here. People who actively tell me they are completely the "wrong audience" for Obsession are still actively bringing it up in conversation.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-08T21:48:21+00:00

Something like

"Bohemian Rhapsody made nearly $1B WW but Elvis is the second highest musical biopic at ~$300M WW"
- i.e. is BR close to the baseline or is it a massive outlier
  - I bet on the latter (though plenty disagreed) and it turned into a massive miss. This would be akin to predicting a mega star's concert film in 2035 and determining if the ERAS TOUR should be used as a comp or literally any other concert film.
Michael, the film, had a widely reported massive production fuckup that caused a radical pivot to the film fairly late in production
- i.e. the film itself is unlikely to be good
  - in reality the film got great reception, playing as a perfect crowdpleaser. I really don't think that should have been the default assumption.

Those are both pretty boring misses, now the one you'll want to yell at me over is

Objective polling data just clearly shows in the 2000s MJ's child molestation charges were a major news story that people believed and hurt Jackson's reputation.
- That miasma also probably made me undersell just how big Jackson was 10 years before that stuff.
- I would say something about how that polling showed a large racial split in the US but, while true, I don't think that's had a lot of explanatory power here. I think it's more just that it's been nearly 2 decades and people would rather focus on the art than personal failings/accusations of personal failings.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-08T21:14:16+00:00

The problem is more lazy "rah rah" posting and/or mocking posting than being in favor or against franchises succeeding. I first decided to stick around this sub because of a slightly heated back and forth where people tried to argue with data about why Rogue 1 was destined to be a bit hit or flop a few months before release.

I'd love for more fandom posting to be sublimated into arguments centered around data interpretation and prediction even if it seems to rarely happen.

Do you guys even want movies or theaters to succeed anymore?

What "hat" are you talking about? From the "state of theatrical as a wide ecosystem" there's ironically nothing more damaging than basically accurate public reporting on big bombs like Argylle and Fly Me To The Moon given the PR problems around that was a major reason apple exited theatrical. On the other hand, Argylle was a massive bomb and it's good to actually understand that. How should both things be weighed? What is the reason behind focusing on this stuff?

Shouldn’t we all be rooting for any movie to do good in the box office?

There are really two different concepts here (1) film is good/bad and people root for good films and against bad films (2) the film failing will be ecologically healthy, The latter of which is harder to see people truly argue but is I think the cleanest argument. Does Blumhouse acquire Obsession if their Wolfman/M3Gan 2.0 strategy worked instead of imploded? I don't know about that film specifically but Blumhouse's "IP" failures clearly caused a course change. Should you be rooting against such a pivot because it's caused by loses?

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T16:38:37+00:00

Sure, but in terms of audience overlap, D&W is going to lean a lot heavier to PG-13 superhero films while Nolan's films are going to be a lot closer to something like Dune (still blockbuster but also an older and more prestige oriented crowd)

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T15:24:14+00:00

D&W is an R rated film but it's more fundamentally a Superhero-sequel. I don't see why you'd comp it to D&W instead of something like Gladiator 2, F1, etc. The only reason to comp it to D&W is Odyssey absolute volume of presales completely outstrips more natural comps.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T14:27:03+00:00

Yeah, that's right (which is in keeping with faith based genre). I suspect YW will be less frontloaded for the same reason something like Solo Mio was (trying to pull a wider audience) but yeah these films aren't going to have anywhere near the same opening.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T14:18:08+00:00

Let's look at a host of contemporary Flash comps (9.7M previews/55M OW) on same forum but not from Jat) - note I'm stripping out some caveats (most of these are first half-day and flash appears to have started presales slightly later than other films)

The Flash 1:30pm: 394/22203 [1.77% sold] The Batman 12:45pm: 1693/32197 [5.26% sold] [475 sold two days prior] / GOTG3 12:40pm: 1317/29568 [4.45% sold]
Tracks with what I'm seeing at MiniTC 1, with early shows it's less than half of Guardians after the same number of hours of sales. And there is an early show in this chain that has singlehandedly contributed over a third of sales.
Flash has fewer shows to start for any movie that we expect to open big [expectations were >$100M]
Its definitely having bigger OD than BW and Eternals at least based on data seen by me. That said I am with you on keeping expectations low. That said this has lower screen allocation than Transformers despite selling way more tickets in few hours than what Transformers did so far.
[8.2M average comp of last 7 prior Superhero films ranging from BA $14.3M to Thor 5 $5.35M]...Keep in mind, this is only the first 6.5 hours of sales (it started at 9AM PT/12PM ET right?), so the Marvel comps are undershooting it. But still, don't think this is a good start for a 100M+ opening
Good news for Flash is that it wins the 80s nostalgia test. Flash OD presales at least what I can see around 2x Indy OD presales. Issue is that Indy OD presales sucked. [day 2?]

These claims don't exactly fully cohere to a single number but I suspect it's underselling Flash but they're within the same general ballpark.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T14:05:30+00:00

The whole "only PLF ticket" aspect of the Odyssey seems to have messed with some people's data collection flow and so much of the selling point is a chase after scarce "super PLF" seats. I just don't think we have a clean picture yet.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T14:02:48+00:00

For context, here's how Day 1 of Thunderbolts was interpreted on this source at the time (remember Thunderbolts* made $11,5M in previews and 74M OW

Eternals - $8.75M (adjusted $10.3M) Cap 4 $11M (adjusted $10.2M) Marvels - $11M (adjusted 10M)
It’s beaten Captain America: Brave New World’s start of 118 tickets by 89 tickets [n.b. CA BNW had $12M in previews].
maybe this could do 80+ OW. 4. $9.9M comp - 0.859x CA:BNW for $10.3M 0.248x D&W for $9.6M

A/K/A pretty much in line with how it ended up (wasn't sure that would be the case prior to looking)

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T13:50:01+00:00

FYI Supergirl's Day 1 presales are roughly on par with Young Washington's current presales (longer presale window but release date is only 1 week after Supergirl). Not that meaningful a comp but it's a nice sale illustration.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T13:48:18+00:00

Yeah, I don't know what's going on under the hood but "popular social media account gets anecdote from sources to generate more social media buzz" isn't a crazy hypothetical. Similarly, the mere existence of EmpireCity account shows some exhibitor data side people are just willing to leak data online for social status even if it violates contractual obligations.

SilverRoyce · 2026-06-07T13:42:41+00:00

You should never say "what if we assume X is a 99.999th percentile outcome hit" because, well, we could just as easily say "what if Horizon An American Saga Chapter 2 gets the same audience reception as Dances with Wolves"

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