What Even *IS* The August Box Office

  This past weekend saw 3 new releases completely and utterly fail at the domestic box office. This is, on one level, unsurprising: none of "Fall", "Bodies Bodies Bodies", or "Mack & Rita" were distributed by a major studio or got a major advertising campaign. On a more detailed second glance, it looks somewhat surprising to me. People (on social media, anyways) claim to want high quality and original films. "Bodies" has great reviews (a 91% tomato rating) and comes into the market armed with the A24 branding that got rather respectable launches for summer horror movies such as "Hereditary" and "Midsommar". Fall has decent reviews (the 71% tomato rating is surely good enough to not actively scare away a teen thriller crowd) and shares a pair of producers with the "47 Meters Down" franchise, a couple of truly awful movies that nevertheless made solid money as widely released indies in the summer months. And if there is any genre that is truly in vogue outside of big action blockbusters these days, it's the straightforward horror/thriller. A third and even more careful glance would tell you that this is just what happens in August. 

 Traditional logic of the movie business says that January and February are the so-called "dump months". If you have a very bad film that was too expensive to not release in theaters, you put it in January. A big part of that is accounting logistics; a bomb in January can offset the income taxes you'd be paying on your hits released around the December holidays, or if those don't exist because your financial year didn't go too hot, you can push the losses to the next fiscal year. The other big factor that goes into that release schedule is awards. While most Oscar nominated films technically release in theaters between October and December, they tend to hit their highest number of theaters played in during the mid-January to mid-February window, when Oscar nominees are announced but the awards show hasn't happened yet. The award nom is, in itself, marketing for the movie. There's only so many blockbusters with 9 digit budgets to be released, and a big chunk come out in December, and after that it makes sense to sit on them until after the Oscars, while your cheaper films make money in the very short window where that's possible. But, theaters need stuff to play, and if Disney or Paramount cannot provide any stuff, then a very bad movie that a smaller distributor like Roadside Attractions or Open Road is contractually obligated to drop into X number of theaters will do. I choose to spend this much time breaking down box office theory because it's only partly true.

 In 2019, the last year where the box office followed a "normal" pattern, there were 3 pairs of weekends under $110 million domestic each. We have a late January window, which is exactly what we would expect. Bafflingly, we have the last weekend in October and the first weekend in November. This one can be marked up to specific factors (both a James Bond sequel and a Wonder Woman sequel were supposed to be released in this window but got delayed). And then, we have late August, a nearly as bad as late January period with just 4 wide releases, with only the overtly religious film "Overcomer" from Sony being a major studio release. 2018 saw a similar pattern, where the last 2 weeks of August both saw less money spent on movie tickets than any period of that January. I like to think of 2018 as peak August. There were a few genuine hits from big studios (WB's "The Meg" and "Crazy Rich Asians"), a Sony film that was vaguely profitable in spite of its embarrassing quality ("Slender Man" here, but I'm being this specific because Sony tends to do this most years. Do not expect good quality from Sony Pictures' "The Invitation", coming to theaters August 26 2022)

 ... and something called "Dog Days", a Nina Dobrev romcom with a truly incomprehensible plot summary from LD Entertainment that allegedly released in over 2000 theaters. LD Entertainment has released 4 films in theaters since 2013, none of which made any meaningful amount of money. Other "notable" independent releases include "The Happytime Murders" (STX, $9.5 mil opening weekend, one of the very worst movies I've ever had the displeasure of sitting thru), "A.X.L." (Global Road, the offspring of Open Road after that company needed an interjection of foreign cash to stay in business, $2.8 mil), "Operation Finale" (MGM, $6 mil, ostensibly decent but not good enough to stand up to scrutiny in Film Festival season), and "Kin" (Lionsgate, $3 mil, I would confidently guess most people have never heard of this movie despite it costing $30 mil to make and starring James Franco and Zoe Kravitz). August 2018 saw just $856 mil spent at the domestic box office, less than the $958 mil spent in January, but somehow more than the $669 take for September. 

 So how unusual are these conditions? Well, I built a graph of wide releases that tanked: anything that played in at least 1000 theaters but made under $10 mil at the box office for its opening weekend. The pattern we end up with sure is a pattern!

 We can debate what actually constitutes a flop. The Disney Company is on here twice, for a pair of nature documentaries released in April. I can't imagine that $4.8 mil in one weekend for panda documentary "Born In China" is considered a bad move in their offices. Ditto for the wave of overtly Evangelical dramas that popped up in the years since "God's Not Dead", which consistently dropped in March and April in just enough theaters to qualify for my arbitrary list, and end up with as much money as you could reasonably expect overtly evangelical movies to make. But this is a good measure of where the "space fillers" are, the movies that are released into theaters for the sake of theaters having more product to push out. If we filter out that second chart to only films budgeted for at least $10 mil, we get this:

 Data is beautiful! Here is where August gets to shine brightest. An enormous number of money losers, some of which were released by big corporations but a large chunk come from second tier studios Lionsgate and STX, 2 of the only companies in the industry who regularly lose money but theoretically have the infrastructure to launch big hits (A24 is probably another mid-level company at this point, but "Free Fire" was their only flop expensive enough to make this chart within the 2017-2019 data range). We have attendance from the who's who of genuine independent film distributors who went out of business or quit the theatrical business after releasing too many movies that fit this criteria: Open/Global Road, Broad Green Pictures, Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios, and Aviron Pictures, who lasted 6 whole films before their founder was accused of wire fraud. 

 Larger studios are not immune to the August mega-flop. The ultimate punchline I'm building up to is "We Are Your Friends", the Zac Efron DJ drama that at the time of its release had the worst box office in the history of movies for how many theaters it played in: under $1.8 mil in 2,333 theaters. This was a bit strange. For one thing, like this weekend's flops, the movie was basically decent. And unlike this weekend's flops, "We Are Your Friends" had both a major studio marketing it (Warner Brothers) and a decent combo of star and director to market (Zac Efron was in with the youths in 2015, and Max From Catfish indirectly marketed a DJ love triangle thru MTV). The connecting thread here seems to be that movies aimed squarely at teens performed particularly poorly. It's not an unexpected phenomenon in the age of streaming that the teenage audience doesn't really show up for small, original films near the end of summer, but I do think it's disappointing. 

 I'm not sure if there's a broader lesson to be learned here. If movie studios are unaware that teen-centric movies will not do well in the week before those teen audiences go back to school, I guess they should be made aware. But I'm pretty sure the studios do know that, and don't care. The film calendar tends to be a self-reinforcing item. The distributor believes that audiences don't want to see movies in certain times of the year, so they choose to only release films that they expect audiences don't want to see at any time of the year. When audiences don't see those films, the cycle continues. The little guys, the A24s and Lionsgates and Open Roads, settle for those calendar placements, because they frankly do not have the weight to release movies in July or October against more competitive blockbusters. And we wonder why these smaller film studios keep going under, and why the bigger ones keep getting safer and less creative.