The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
New films are not enough, old films come together. Three days last weekend, a re-release of Sony Pictures' Spider-Man: Homeless re-enactment re-entered 3,935 theaters in North America, grossing $6 million at the weekend box office, and after a few months, it topped the weekend box office list.
Compared with the official version released at the end of last year, this re-release version of "Spider-Man: Homeless" is a gimmick of "The More Fun Stuff Version", and the promotional posters and materials have also been remade, which is also quite sincere. The film itself, the re-screening version claims to have 13 minutes of extra content, in fact, most of it is some content that has little to do with the plot, including the video call content of the three generations of Spider-Man before the film. However, the audience who really has nothing new to see does not care about this.
Spider-Man: Heroes Of No Return poster
Of course, a bigger part of the reason why everyone goes out to re-brush "Spider-Man" is also because of the cheap fare. In order to stimulate the market, the American Cinema Association launched the first National Cinema Day event on September 3 (Saturday) in the name of "thanksgiving back", with more than 3,000 theaters in North America totaling more than 30,000 screens, and all movies (even if they are IMAX or 3D movies) are ticketed for $3. This price is only about one-third of the current average movie ticket price in the United States, and even if a family of three only needs to watch a movie, it only costs $9, which is a rare cheap leisure method in this era of everything rising.
On Saturday, North American theaters sold a total of 8 million movie tickets, the best result since the opening day of Avengers 4 in April 2019. Of course, this is only in terms of the number of visitors, because the ticket price is only $3, and 8 million tickets can only be exchanged for $24 million, compared with the $157 million on the opening day of "Avengers 4", which is a world of difference.
However, even if it is a loss of money, it is enough to make the theater industry happy. After entering August, the new films that attracted attention were really underserved, the American people were busy with the opening of the school, the streaming media at home, and the box office figures fell sharply compared with the hot summer slots. But on Saturday, spurred on by the $3 promotion, theaters in many places were crowded with people or even hard to find tickets.
Of course, the new movie is still almost nothing. Compared with Sony Pictures' re-listing of "Spider-Man", Universal Pictures is even more powerful, directly sending the 3D version of the old 1975 movie "Jaws" to more than 1200 North American theaters, and actually got a weekend box office of $2.3 million, enough to climb to the ninth place in the weekend box office list.
Poster for the remake of Jaws
In contrast, the real new film, the comedy "Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul" from Focus Pictures. Save Your Soul.), which was released in 1882 theaters over three days over the weekend and grossed only $1.44 million, is clearly less attractive than Spielberg's work from more than forty years ago. The film was directed by Nigerian director Adamma Ebo, who also had a twin sister, Adana Abel, who worked as the film's producer. The sisters originally worked as television screenwriters, and amazon's episodic version of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" was produced by the two of them. Prior to this, Adama Abel had only worked as a TV directer and shot big movies independently, which was the first time.
"Honk the Horn for Jesus, Save Your Soul" is an expansion of a short film by Adama Abel that revolves around a scandal that breaks out in a church. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, when it received good media reviews, and the current rating of film critics on Rotten Tomatoes is maintained at 74%. However, the average North American audience is obviously not very interested, and the audience rating of "Rotten Tomatoes" after the screening is only 26% positive.
"Honk the Horn for Jesus, Save Your Soul" on Rotten Tomatoes was only rated 26% positively after the screening
September has always been a poor time at the North American box office. Even so, the total North American box office in September 2019 reached $687 million. At present, the industry's estimate of the total North American box office in September is only $300 million, which is less than half of the normal period before the epidemic. Moreover, this is against the backdrop of an increase of nearly 20% in 2022 in North America's average movie ticket price compared to 2019. If you just look at the number of admissions, it is even more tragic. The industry has been pondering whether the American people will return to their past movie-watching habits, and in this situation alone, the answer is clearly no.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Ding Xiao