Industry News
by saidiontheside

saidi’s take – 5/30/2023

Hello everyone,

The Memorial Day weekend box office did pretty well for ONE movie opening. “The Little Mermaid” made approx. $95 million 3 day and approx. $117 million 4 day which is the 3rd highest Memorial Day weekend ever (the highest Memorial Day weekend ever is last years “Top Gun Maverick” with $160) and it’s also the #4 best opening weekend for 2023 (so far) after “The Super Mario Bros Movie”, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” (3 days was $106 million for that movie).

Number 2 over the weekend was “Fast X” which some predicted to be almost tied with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” before the weekend but sped ahead of it with $28.5 million and a total of $113 million after it’s 2nd weekend. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was third with $26 million and a total of $305 million after 4 weeks. “The Super Mario Bros Movie” is still doing well with $8 million and keeping its huge lead over everything else for the best domestic box office of 2023 (so far) with almost $560 million domestic total. Another new movie “The Machine” was fifth with just $6 million over the 4-day weekend.

  • Worldwide “The Little Mermaid” had a somewhat disappointing total of $164 million which means that over 70% of its worldwide box office was domestic.  On the other hand, “Fast X” is still doing much better worldwide than it’s doing domestic.  This weekend, its worldwide total passed $500 million which means the domestic box office is only about 22% of its worldwide total.  “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” is still doing strong passing $700 million worldwide which means its domestic box office is approx. half of its worldwide box office.  The #1 movie worldwide is also still “The Super Mario Bros Movie” which is almost at $1.28 BILLION. 
  • Cannes Film Festival finished up this past weekend with a couple more standing ovations.  Pixars “Elemental” got approx. a 5 minute standing ovation (and then got lukewarm reviews) and Wes Andersons “Asteroid City” got a 6 minute standing ovation (and also got lukewarm reviews).  The Palme d’Or winner was “Anatomy of a Fall” which Neon will release in the US later this year.
  • Some people were talking about Jane Fonda who presented most of the awards at Cannes because she threw an award document at the back of the Palme d’Or winner as she was walking away.
  • Matt Damon did a recent interview where he was asked about the “Barbie” vs “Oppenheimer” online debate.  He costars in “Oppenheimer” but he has daughters that will probably want to watch the “Barbie” movie instead.  His response was that he hadn’t heard about the debate yet but “People are allowed to go see two movies in a weekend. Oppenheimer is one of them!” he says with a laugh. As a parent of four daughters, though, one may assume his family will choose Barbie. How does that make him feel? “I’ll have to ask them that. If that’s the case, they’ll see two movies that weekend!”

Little bit of humor:

One of the most famous movie logos ever was the very first “THX” logo.  “The Simpsons” even did a parody of it and then THX made a revised trailer of the logo using “The Simpsons” parody”.  The sound even had a name: “Deep Note”