There’s been lots of discussion lately about the prospects of staged-release movies. With last weekend’s releases all being of the platformed variety, all sorts of theories were being thrown around Ticker Talk about how to predict the box office for a movie about to go wide. These ranged from simple proportionality (“the movie made $1M on 100 screens last weekend, so it will make $10M on 1000 screens this weekend”) to fairly sophisticated rules of thumb (“with your typical expansion, screen averages drop by about 70%”). Hopefully, this column will be of some use in between the myriad alternatives.

To start, let’s quickly debunk that first method. The assumption behind the proportionality theory is that the amount of money made per theater does not change when the number of theaters increases. However, looking at most of the platformed movies since the latter half of 1998, I’ve seen only two instances of films that did not lose any per screen average (PSA) while significantly expanding. The first is A Simple Plan, which had a $5K PSA on 80 screens but a $5.2K PSA the next week on 660 screens (thanks to Ramon for pointing this one out). The second is Shakespeare in Love, which saw a $4.2K PSA in 833 theaters expand to a $4.6K PSA in 1956 theaters (this boost is entirely attributable to the announcement of Oscar nominations).

And that’s it. Just those two solitary exceptions (I looked at over 15). There are many reasons why this should be the case. First off, there will always be the natural dropoff of business at those theaters who are running the film for the second week (depending, as it always does, on the size of the opening weekend rush and the quality of word-of-mouth). And of course, we know that the movie business is not immune to the economic laws of competition – a theater enjoying a local monopoly on a film obviously will draw more patrons than one that has to contend with several others.

Looking beyond these obvious reasons, though, one finds a number of subtler reasons that contribute to PSA decline. For one, many of these platformed releases are critical and artistic darlings, which might draw a lot better among New York and Los Angeles audiences than they do in suburban multiplexes. Another reason is that theaters that host the only run of a movie in a given city are often large, and run the movie on several screens, factors which aren’t duplicated when the film hits the ‘burbs.

So how do we use these factors to predict PSA dropoffs? Well, clearly the biggest factor is the size of the expansion. The three films that I looked at that made the biggest leap from limited release into wide release (percentage-wise) were SNOWF, LIVLO, and CIVIL. CIVIL went from $35.4K on two screens to $8.4K on 1802, a dropoff of 76% in PSA, SNOWF went from $16.3K on three screens to $3.4K on 1150 screens, a dropoff of 79%, and LIVLO had an 81% drop from $21.2K on 8 screens to $4.0K on 1086 screens. These three were three of only four films that registered a PSA drop of over 70% (the third being Election, which had a 78% drop when it went from 14 screens to 827; I’m not quite sure which factors to attribute that one to).

On the other side of the ledger, we have films that take their expansions piecemeal, like CIDER ($4.7K PSA on 332 screens expanding to $3.8K on 816); ELIZA ($9.1K on 144 expanding to $6.6K on 516); and AMBEA ($13.8K on 429 expanding to $11.6K on 706). In fact, for films with smallish expansions like these, a good rule of thumb to use is to treat them exactly like regular films returning for their second week. For example, with AMBEA, we see that its first weekend on 429 screens made about $6M. We know that, ignoring the expansion for the time being, the next weekend would be about $5M, since the word of mouth was incredible. Since the expansion to 706 screens can’t possibly decrease that absolute figure, we can use the $5M figure as a minimum estimate for the next weekend, tack on a tad extra for the additional 300 screens, and come up with a relatively good figure.

There are a couple other mitigating factors that might provide for less of a PSA dropoff. First is advertising – a film that gets virtually no advertising until the very week before release will suffer less of a dropoff than one that had been advertising while the film was limited. Secondly, one should also consider how long in limited release the film had been before going wide. If the movie was limited for just one week, much of its limited PSA would have been inflated by the opening weekend rush. On the other hand, if it had been stuck in a limited pattern for a while, it would have started to exhaust the local audience; the wide release thus gives it an opportunity to tap new markets. For example, three of our four big PSA drops (CIVIL, SNOWF, ELECT, LIVLO) had all been in limited release for only one week before going wide (SNOWF was two weeks), while the two movies that gained in PSA had been stuck at the same level of release for some time (ASMPL for 6 weeks, SHKSP for 5+).

Generally, then, I think a good way to go about figuring out expansions is to first figure out just how big an expansion it is. There are small expansions (say, going from 200 screens to 600 screens), medium expansions (from 30 to 200, or from 200 to 1400), and large (from 20 to >1000). Each type of expansion has a “rule of thumb” percentage dropoff (about 30% for small, 50% for medium, 65% for large) which you can then tweak using the criteria laid out above (artsy vs. mainstream, word of mouth, advertising, etc.)

So what does this all mean for LHURR and GINTR? LHURR took in a $35K PSA on 11 screens, and expanded to a $15.2K PSA on 160 screens last weekend. Ads have been running for a while, but it doesn’t seem overly geared towards the high-brow audience, and word of mouth is fairly good. Screens for this weekend are rumored to be around 1800. The closest comparison I can see is THINR, which had a 65% PSA drop when it went from 61 screens to 1528. Percentagewise, this is a bigger expansion than LHURR’s, and THINR is decidedly less mainstream, so we should whittle that 65% figure down a tad. If you figure a 55% drop in PSA for LHURR, we get around $6.8K per screen. On 1800 screens, that’s about $12M. Don’t forget to add in the previous box office of around $4M, and one gets an approximate adjust of $39.

GINTR took in $17K per screen on 9 screens last weekend. While it also doesn’t seem to be too much for mainstream audiences to handle, and its per screen take has been going up each weekend for three weekends, signalling some fairly good buzz, a leap from 9 screens to over 1000 can definitely take a huge bite out of your PSA. There is a hard bottom, though, at an 80% dropoff, so we can pretty much assume a $3.4K screen average for this weekend at the very least. Since ads have been plentiful (unlike, say, SNOWF or LIVLO), you probably want to bump that figure up somewhat, depending on how effective you think the advertising has been. 

Good luck, and have fun storming the castle!