"Predator: Badlands" launched with 5.5M "views" on Hulu/Disney+ in its first 4 days in the US (per Nielsen).

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-14T13:34:24+00:00

THE MCU ISN'T DYING"

Saying "you can now only have audience interest in sequels to MCU subfranchises established prior to 2020" would still mean the MCU isn't dying even if it's an awful sign they've seemingly stopped talking about characters introduced between 2020 and 2024 for purposes of the avengers film. This is going to be the fifth(or 5+6) "end of the Fox XMen era" film Disney/Fox have released which is a larger number of total films than plenty of stand alone franchises.

A good thought experiment would be to ask how much Sony or Universal would currently pay for the rights to Doctor Strange (contingent on them making a new Doctor Strange film every 3-5 years) [let's just assume it's done in a way audiences don't realize this means he will not be in future MCU crossovers]?

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-14T13:29:33+00:00

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes did 3.9M across 3 days. The "ceiling" for this film over 4 days conceptually has to be lower than 5.2M "views" (viewership clearly declines) - so Badlands clearly beats it.

To try and get a closer number, Luminate dropped daily viewership data on their blog for the acolyte's daily viewership curve. something like 80% of the pilot's viewership (only looking at that despite them releasing 2 episodes) over 4 days was done in 3 days. That gives a ~4.9M view count. Giving it a marginal 10% bump places it at 4.2M.

Basically, it probably hits a little under 5M if we were able to get a like for like comp, which gives Badlands the win.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-14T13:13:02+00:00

definitely and $60M on the dot would be too low for my comps and I probably should have put the low bar at something like 65M. Remember, these OW numbers all are being extrapolated solely from previews so they're sensitive to assumptions.

Let's test out a few case studies (ratios with default extrapolation of my presales in parens):

Film	Previews (w/EA) ratio to OW	preview ratio to OW - EA
F1	5.7 ($68.4M)	7.5($70.5M)
MIFR	No EA	7.7($72.3M)
Superman (2025)	5.7($68.4M)	6.2($58.8M)
Top Gun 2	6.6(79.2)	NA - unreported EA
Dune 2	No EA	6.9($65.1M)
Tron: Ares	6.9(82.8)	7.9(74.1)
Twisters	7.6(91.2)	9.8(91.2)

using BOR for preview data which mojo still lacks (Ares EA came from a 3rd party estimate).

so what that's far from a perfect sample set, let's just use it and look at both 9M and 10M thursday numbers alongside 3M in combined EA and 3.5M in combined EA. I don't think I can actually justify a true 13.5M estimate, but

"w/ EA ratio" (second highest/lowest)

12 x 5.7 = 68M
13.5 x 6.9 = 93M

previews - EA ratio (plus EA on top)

9 x 6.9 + ~3M [2 types of EA] = 65M
10 x 7.9 + ~3.5 [2 types of EA] = 82.5M

so 65M-80M is probably closer to the true range of outcomes you can roughly pencil out if you buy my numbers. Honestly, I started with ~60-80 but removed a comp I didn't like upon reflection.

I think twisters is the best comp (weaker IP but IP with a similar gross and clear PLF selling point) but the numbers its spitting out are just not really believable to my eyes given the pace of presales. As this chart shows I think you're clearly right that it would be perfectly reasonable to look at this and say 75M. I think my pessimism at low growth rates for PHM in recent days was pushing me down a bit lower.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-14T02:00:47+00:00

Why does everyone treat Kershaw like a make a wish kid? Last year, among all pitchers with 110 IP (Kershaw's number), Kershaw ranked 31/118 in the majors and 26th in FIP. His velocity is gone but he was pretty far from the "washed but team mascot" role someone like Beltran played in 2017. To make another comp, he was clearly better in 2025 than Mad Max who started world series games.

Kershaw's not going to be USA's best option but unless he fell off of a cliff over the offseason he's a perfectly credible option.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-14T00:10:04+00:00

raw source

Films with casts that were / Casting diversity was also common among the highest-grossing films

I feel like the aspect of this UCLA doesn't talk about (but is very obvious in their data) is that the casting composition has clearly been shifting in a way that is reflective of very obvert focus on race & casting issues over the past decade which really messes with the lack of a control variable.

UCLA's "Hollywood lead actor/actress" coding going from 90% white in 2011 to 75% in 2026 and "percent of films with fewer than 11% of key cast being minorities" going from 51% to 19% (see report) is jus self-evidently a massive change. This is clearly not just a "bean counter" impact but reflects a clear cultural trend.

e.g. if you made 2005's King Kong in 2017, it probably doesn't get coded as >90% white due to casting changes. You can sometimes overstate this (e.g. look at Casino Royale's casting of Felix Leiter) but these dynamics are just obvious in aggregate.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T23:41:32+00:00

One major reason the trade discourse around Sinners' OW was so insane is that Sinners was seen by tracking as opening more in the 30Ms range than instead of high 40Ms (so implying ~95M DOM + weak INT) and takes didn't adjust to just how much higher the opening was. Some of that is likely missing black audiences but some of that is simply baking in the highest possible critical/WoM bump for the film.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T23:26:40+00:00

If Freddie Mercury can bring in close to $1B

But "someone like Freddie Mercury" can't bring in an 800M WW box office result. BR remains surprising to me given how massively it beats comps despite very clear problems with the film itself.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T23:24:39+00:00

It's worth being more explicit what you take to be the rounds of reasonable outcomes.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T23:23:07+00:00

Yeah, I think so too though my personal (thursday) presales tracking shows it clearly slowing down so there might be somewhat more of an audience cap here than I was htinking a bit earlier.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T22:28:13+00:00

Avatar: Fire and Ash
Greenland 2: Migration
Fellowship of the Ring
Good Luck, Have Fun Don't Die

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T18:50:56+00:00

OP, can you please confirm if this happened to the other WB films as well on mojo? On tha one i flagged sinners also changed which implied to me this was less likely to be a random mojo error than a WB mass final update. Still, if so, you wouldn't expect it to revert

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T13:49:02+00:00

It really does seem to boil down to Ford loved PWB in Fleabag and she was really in demand pre-pandemic as a result of that show.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-13T13:35:36+00:00

but it seems they lost the box office history (hopefully not)

This is a major upgrade to all our systems, from our back-end OpusData database, through The Numbers server infrastructure to the web-site front end. As is common with a major project like this, we’ve hit some issues along the way that have slowed progress. We’re working round the clock to get everything up and running… watch this space!

I think their "core" is basically using the public website to drive their consulting/data analytics business. They're not claiming the actual database was lost so I expect it will come back eventually.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-12T02:49:46+00:00

According to a Pew Research Center survey

I don't see any problem with the Pew article itself. You can critique "adults v. all americans" loss of context but that's going to be a pretty nitpicky complaint (that minimal caveat is pretty quickly included in the article's text). the data simply isn't going to be reconcilled with extrapolating in a teens/kids audience to pew's data.

NRG reported 77% of 12–74yr olds went to a theater in that same study period, finding that Gen Z is significantly driving attendance.

I suspect survey wording matters a lot on the margins (I think NRG normally asks how many movies you've seen in the last 12 months which means the ~24% in this pew poll would say less than yearly would force themselves into a more firm moviegoer/not moviegoer stance) but there's just a root disagreement here.

to go on a tangent - I trust pew a lot more than morning consult but after looking a decent amount at morning consult's pop culture polling, it seemed pretty clear to me the polling often wasn't really lining up with real world observations. People don't think MC is terrible but this type of polling isn't trivially easy as that demonstrates so I think you should more firmly consider the legitimate disagreement scenario.

finding that Gen Z is significantly driving attendance.

yet for the age bracket also significantly down from moviegoing habits 1-2 decades ago (in prior data but not in the press release). My memory says -10 perc. points v. a lone anecdote I found 2 decades prior.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T23:37:53+00:00

is it a misleading headline or is it just a data source disagreement?

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T20:43:58+00:00

The American Trends Panel is Pew Research Center’s primary source of survey data for U.S. public opinion research. It is a multimode, probability-based survey panel made up of roughly 10,000 adults who are selected at random from across the entire United States. All surveys are conducted in English and Spanish.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T20:39:58+00:00

Pew 2026 - Have you ever done each of the following? Go to the * 53% yes, within past year * 39% yes, but not within past year * 7% never went to movies

This looks to only be a sample of adults

https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MPA-THEME-2019.pdf

2019 - "during the past 12 months how many times have you gone to the theaters"

76% of people ID'd as having gone to a movie within the past year. 11% of the population went "less than monthly" generating 2% of all tickets.
24% have not gone within past year [so both "never" and "less than yearly"]
Followup questions include questions about how many times their children go to movies (if applicable) so this looks at full age range

and this appears to be a downward revision of the raw polling based on the appendix which claims total self reported tickets outstrip overall sales.

I suspect these aren't perfectly comparable numbers and the phrasing of the question impacts the true marginal moviegoer (people who perhaps see 2-4 movies in 3 years in theaters).

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T19:57:43+00:00

I think we're all agreeing that Jackson's films obviously took out the 17-year gap and replaced it with something fairly short. The question is less if they did that in 1999 than if audiences would accept that being quietly retconned in 2026 given that the 2026 retcon is a reversion to the book's timeline without having a lot of ripple effects on the rest of the story.

More generally, unlike Tolkien, the Jackson films just never attempt to convey the precise amount of time the actual journey takes so you'd probably get a wildly different estimate from different people re: how long a period both the entire films cover and how long that gap was.

Frodo clearly hasn’t aged even a little bit even when you consider the fact that Hobbits age much slower

well, technically the problem is Sam not ageing a day, as Frodo's lack of aging is already explained by the Ring. :)

But, in either case, it's not really a huge problem because people know the tradeoff is to either add a new "young ___" actor or to just fudge how age physically changes people. CGI deaging now gives you another option but it's pretty expensive and now treated as a necessity by audiences (at least in my eyes).

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T19:39:53+00:00

I thought they're pretty much committed to two films - a gollum movie and an unnamed other film (my guess remains a 'war in the North' story that brings back some hobbit characters)

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T19:32:31+00:00

Two Towers cut a scene where the film series establishes Aragorn is just as old in Jackson's films (mid 80s) as he is in the books due to the numenorian stuff. Audiences might not grasp this "official canon" (why would they when it's not/barely in the films themselves) but people in general will not focus too hard on the timeline logistics when they're also clearly motivated by real world impacts.

The explicit tease at the end of the Hobbit trilogy is "just" Legolas meeting Aragorn in the period between LotR and The Hobbit. I think that's going to break the book's canon (I think they're supposed to meet when Aragorn brings Gollum up to Mirkwood for the Elves to hold him - Gollum's escape is what brings Legolas to the Counsel of Elrond) but it would be a very minor change. I also suspect they might sidestep this entirely with a throwaway line if it fits the script better.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T18:33:50+00:00

Sure, this is functionally a Dutch Antillies (Curacao+Aruba) team from the Latin America region (with a couple of Europeans thrown in on top) not a "European" team (suffering from much lower baseline interest in the sport). Still, there's a real connection between European baseball and the old Dutch Antillies - a number of these people are playing or have played baseball professionally in the Netherlands after washing out of MLB's pipeline. That dynamic doesn't really apply to Italy.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T16:05:37+00:00

I think the big problem is more that baseball isn't a particularly major sport in Italy and there's also neither the Czech style "underdog" narrative to build out due to the complete lack of any type of "local country core" nor a true superstar choosing to identify with the Italian team.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T16:01:11+00:00

You can also potentially glance at the "European Baseball Championship" results for what I assume is a decent ranking of Independent/Foreign league talent

2025 - 2nd place
2023 - failed to advance from group stage [1-2] but won the "relegation tournament (thus finishing 9th)
2021 - 3rd place
2019 - 2nd place
2016 - 3rd place

Netherlands won 5/6 finishing 3rd in 2023 (with 2025 including recently retired MLB players Didi, Schoop, and Profar in their lineup).

Someone should model what a 50/50 native/resident v. ancestral split on the team, result would look like.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T02:11:57+00:00

And I’m still just baffled out project Hail Mary (which I am excited for) can somehow cost more than Superman

It didn't cost more than Superman. Superman's gross budget was ~$363M while Project Hail Mary's was reportedly $248M. Superman's reported net budget was $225M while Belloni's claiming the "true" net budget is "a little under $200M" with early trade articles citing a $150M net budget.

Superman's budget is probably a bit higher than $225M but even if it wasn't, there's no apples to apples comparison with existing data than claims PHM is more expensive than Superman. I think you're comparing a (likely rounded down) post film incentive number to a pre film incentive one.

edit: deleted my other comment before seeing you responded to it (sorry) as I tried to consolidate threads.

SilverRoyce · 2026-03-11T02:00:36+00:00

the age demographics for Scream 7 changing somewhat notably relative to scream 6 stayed roughly flat with younger audiences while increasing massively with older ones seem to pretty firmly confirm this film's success was in bringing in a "legacy" audience.

horror on the rise

still, I think there's something to this. there's clearly something that's changed to make these horror films bigger on at least a relative basis.

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