Weekend projections: Red One debuts with OK $34 million

The best that can be said for Red One’s opening this weekend is that it’s OK. As a slightly rare case of new IP, the film was a gamble, and if the rumors are true that it cost $250 million to make, plus another $100 million or so to market, then a $34-million domestic opening weekend leaves it deep in the red. On the other hand, crowds are loving it (much more than critics), and Amazon MGM Studios will have a movie to promote on Prime Video every Christmas for years to come. So the economics might work for the studio, and even a modest success is better than nothing for theater owners.

Here’s how the weekend numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Red One is landing right in line with our model’s Friday-morning prediction. Its opening is also virtually identical to several other Dwayne Johnson movies: Jungle Cruise opened with $35 million and made $117 million domestically; Rampage started with $35.7 million and ended with $101 million; Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle debuted with $36.2 million and delivered a remarkable $404.5 million by the end of its run. So Red One has done just enough to make a $100-million domestic total a good bet, and it could do much more than that if it gets on a roll. Competition will be fierce between now and the end of the year though, and it’s more likely to lose theaters after Thanksgiving and peter out by the end of the year.

Red One does seem to have pulled moviegoers away from a few other films, and the rest of the top 10 looks fairly weak. The outstanding performer in limited release is the Filipino romantic drama Hello, Love, Again, which we’re estimating will earn $2.37 million this weekend (we don’t have an official number). The film is a sequel to 2019’s Hello, Love, Goodbye, and is another case of a film targeted towards a very specific audience breaking through in theaters. This has become a running theme for 2024, and points towards a likely future for the industry. With virtually all films delivered to theaters digitally, and the end of virtual print fees that were used to subsidize the purchase of digital projectors, it’s now possible to get a film to many theaters at a relatively low cost. Hello, Love, Again is playing in a relatively limited 248 theaters this weekend, but that would have meant spending well over $100,000 to make and distribute prints back in the day—probably an unacceptable risk for most distributors, particularly when marketing would have increased the cost to more like $1 million. Now, highly-targeted social media marketing, and print distribution costs closer to $25,000, make a film like this a viable nationwide release.

That’s a sea change for the industry, with big implications for the way films are made and marketed. That’s a topic we’ll be looking at closely in The Numbers Business Report over the next year. For now, we can celebrate a new crowd-pleasing franchise emerging and giving 248 theaters a pleasant boost at the box office this weekend.

– Studio weekend projections

– All-time top-grossing movies in North America

– All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com