Thursday, November 20, 2008

Last week was a really weird week.

The last playweek (Religulous and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) was one of the weirdest weeks ever in terms of attendance.
There are basic patterns Western Film tends to follow. How well Friday and Saturday do can usually be extrapolated into how well the rest of the week will do. That's partially how I can make a decision on Monday about whether to keep a movie for another week even though I don't know for sure how it's going to finish.
There are of course variables such as weather and holidays.

here's the base assumptions. I knew Religulous would do well but I wasn't sure how well. Nick and Norah I wasn't sure about. I figured it would do okay at least but could bomb. I didn't expect it to do really well.

I don't normally use actual numbers but in this case I will since I don't think the meaning will come across if I don't.

On Friday Religulous did about 90 people and Nick and Norah about 35, respectable numbers for each.
They both did almost exactly the same numbers for Saturday.
Sunday and Monday are the quietest nights so based on the above I would have expected about 30 and 15 on Sunday. My staff got somewhat surprised when we again had 90 and 35 show up?! I've never seen something like that happen without a holiday or some extenuating factor.

Monday night we weren't sure what to expect and much to my surprise once again got 90 and 35.

Based on the weekend numbers I would have expected about 200 and 100 on Tuesday since it's discount night. However I wasn't sure if the pattern would hold since things had been weird so far. About 6:49 Tuesday I was thinking the pattern had broken because we didn't have a lot of people yet and it just didn't seem like it was going to be busy. However at 6:50 people started coming in droves and we ended up with 173 for Religulous. Based on that and the weekend I still expected about 100 for Nick and Norah. Much to our surprise 193 people showed up?!

Wednesday was about the same as the weekend which isn't unusual.

I expected about the same for Thursday. Again we were surprised when 137 people showed up for Religulous, a high number for any non-Tuesday show. Nick and Norah did about the same as it did the other nights.

So Religulous ended up as the third highest grosser of the year, second if you count the 85 high school students who came to a special afternoon showing. Nick and Norah did about twice what I would have guessed it's maximum would be.

So all in all it was a great week. I think it was somewhat fluky, good movies that people hadn't seen yet in a week when there weren't too many midterms?

So this leaves me with the question of whether to bring Religulous back for another week. Normally a film does about half of what it did the first week, but was that week a fluke and artificially high?! I'm also reminded of the situation that happened with Borat. It's first week was huge, one of the highest of the year but it's second week was only about 15% of it's first week, really weird.

I'll probably bring Religulous back if there aren't any new movies I need to play. I'm very curious to see how it does....

1 comment:

Gaston said...

Now that I know you have decided to bring 'Religulous' back, let us know how it does in its second run.

I went to watch it on Tuesday and I wasn't expecting much (as a matter of fact, I'm not sure why on Earth I was going =P ). After seeing the movie, I definitely have no idea what was I thinking when I went to watch it.