Illumination/Universal’s Despicable Me 4 won the weekend with $44.6 million, but Neon‘s Nicolas Cage-Maika Monroe starrer Longlegs stole the headlines, delivering the best original horror opening year-to-date and the best-ever start for the Tom Quinn-run 7-year old distribution company with $22.6M.
That’s an excellent win for original movies, a much-needed boost for the horror genre, and a big win for the arthouse circuit, which we hear had several sellouts over the weekend with theaters adding showtimes. Overall, per ComScore, it’s the seventh highest-grossing weekend of the year at $129M for all titles.
We told you at the onset of the summer that Longlegs could surprise, with Neon executing a deft marketing campaign with clever clips; overall, a campaign that hid Nicolas Cage. The amazing coup here with Neon is how they racked up a ton of money off a very high single-digit P&A spend — all digital, sans TV. In addition, Dave Caplan’s C2 financed Longlegs for under $10M. Sources verify this is true.
Neon posted 11 videos of Longlegs on YouTube in the last 90 days, amounting to 30 million views, according to Tubular Labs. Consider that major studios, seeing how horror worked in the post-pandemic space, flooded marquees with titles, each one paling one after the other YTD with $8M-$11M openings apiece. However, patterns can be broken and new norms created, and that’s Longlegs.
Exclaimed David Herrin, founder of entertainment intelligence group Quorum, which saw Longlegs coming, “The genre was meant for re-invention and this was a shot in the arm for it. Neon was so super smart in their marketing, not revealing everything and not showing Nicolas Cage.”
As Neon’s press note so appropriately says this AM: “Not since The Blair Witch Project launched 25 years ago on the same weekend in July has there been an independent genre film that out-projected, out-performed, and over-indexed so wildly that it seemed to the industry it ‘came out of nowhere.’” Amen. Blair Witch Project in the third weekend of its wide break opened to $29.2M, and finaled at $140.5M, becoming the feather in then-distributor Artisan’s cap. Artisan would eventually get absorbed by Lionsgate, which has been racking its head on how to reinvent that franchise (it has yet to hit the heights of the original).
Longlegs reps the best lead-driven project for Monroe at the domestic box office (not counting Independence Day: Resurgence at $41M). Know that horror fans know her from It Follows, the cult horror movie that Quinn handled when he was at Radius. Neon has the sequel to that movie, They Follow, with Monroe returning with filmmaker David Robert Mitchell.
For Cage, once a mega box office-opening star, this is his first live-action movie since 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance to open north of $20M.
“As the summer season of ’24 continues to surprise and amaze with as unpredictable a slate as any in popcorn blockbuster season history, Nicolas Cage finds himself in the company of PG-rated family film blockbusters, a PG-13 horror franchise film, and a space race romance all making their mark in one the most eclectic summer season lineups in industry history,” said Comscore Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
Interesting tidbit is how Neon launched this movie sans a zinger festival ala SXSW, which their previous horror movie Immaculate starring Sydney Sweeney had, debuting to a previous Neon-weekend-high of $5.3M. Essentially, Immaculate had a three-month campaign and required a festival boost to get it out there. Longlegs by comparison had been trailering on every horror movie since January. That’s unheard of for an indie horror movie to have such a long-lead drumroll.
Other stunts executed by Neon for Longlegs, in addition to the bloody nun-chaperoned under-17 Alamo Brooklyn screening on Friday, included a spooky serial killer-coded ad in the Seattle Times.
By the way, Longlegs didn’t have the Imax screens this weekend; DM4 did, with $2.9M and a running stateside cume for the large-format exhibitor on the animated fourthquel of $13.8M.
Beamed Neon distribution boss Elissa Federoff this AM, “This is a non-IP film, a piece of original cinema from Osgood Perkins. The campaign was built with creativity and imagination and launched in January with the reveal of the first cryptic teasers. Over the last six months, it built momentum and garnered enthusiasm. It’s a testament to what a unique cinematic experience will do for an audience if it’s something they haven’t seen before. We built a movement around this film and they rallied behind it.”
What’s next for Neon? In the wake of the pre-pandemic Parasite, Longlegs further bolsters its brand to the hipster 18-34 moviegoing audience. It has another edgy, critically acclaimed horror title (81% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) in Cuckoo starring Hunter Schafer for August 9. Success begets success. Every film sets up the next.
The same lessons here with Longlegs when it comes to horror movies extend to superhero movies as well. Many talk about superhero fatigue, but it’s not really about that. It’s about giving audiences something fresh and new, and intriguing in both genres, and not feathered fishes, which unfortunately is what Apple Original Films’ Fly Me to the Moon is as a 1960s period fake-moon-landing rom-com. It came in under its $12M projection this weekend at $10M, and not a dollar over, for this starry Channing Tatum–Scarlett Johansson team-up.
Before spending $100M, Apple, know that history always teaches us something about the future: There was a movie like this before, and it didn’t make much, and it didn’t cost much at $35M: Peyton Reed’s 2003 Ewan McGregor-Renée Zellweger romantic comedy Down With Love, which was set in 1962 New York and followed a playboy journalist and a feminist advice author. 20th Century Fox didn’t know what to do with the movie either, opening it in one theater in its first weekend to $45,000 before going wide at 2,123 theaters with a $7M three-day total during early May. True, Fly Me to the Moon was higher, but not by much. Down With Love ended its run at $20.3M domestic.
As the saying goes, there isn’t bad box office, just bad budgets. The only difference between Down With Love and Fly Me to the Moon is that the former had a C+ CinemaScore to the latter’s A-. Sony’s hope is that Fly Me to the Moon, as the only rare rom-com gem in the marketplace, will find a female audience.
Nonetheless, as I talk out of both sides of my mouth: No one is knocking for Apple, as a streamer, being in the exhibition space, particularly not theater owners. Let’s give praise for an extra $10M in the marketplace as we recoup from the ramifications of the strikes. It’s just that for a tech company that is fearless about spending cash to make a movie, and brilliant about predicting consumer wants before they know it when it comes to tech, there has to be an equal a sophistication in developing an event movie that will stampede moviegoers to cinemas — just like iPhone buyers line up at Apple Stores on day one of a new edition.
Studio reported estimates:
1.) Despicable Me 4 (Uni) 4,449 (+21) theaters, Fri $13.6M (-50%) Sat $17.4M Sun $13.4M 3-day $44.6M (-40%), Total $211.1M/Wk 2
2.) Longlegs (NEON) 2,510 theatres, Fri $10M, Sat $7.2M Sun $5.4M 3-day $22.6M/Wk 1
3.) Inside Out 2 (Dis) 3,815 (+55) theaters Fri $6.1M (-42%) $8.1M Sun $6.4M 3-day $20.7M (-32%) Total $572.5M/Wk 5
4.) A Quiet Place: Day One (Par) 3,378 (-310) theaters, Fri $3.6M (-49%) Sat $4.6M Sun $3.5M 3-day $11.8M (-43%), Total $116.2M/Wk 3
5.) Fly Me to the Moon (App/Sony) 3,356 locations, Fri $4.4M, Sat $3M Sun $2.5M 3-day $10M/Wk 1
6.) Bad Boys Ride or Die (Sony) 2,200 theaters, Fri $1.2M (-43%) Sat $1.8M Sun $1.3M 3-day $4.4M (-33%), Total $184.8M/Wk 6
7.) Horizon (WB) 2,587 (-747) theaters, Fri $675K Sat $980K Sun $785K 3-day $2.44M (-54%), Total $27M/Wk 3
8.) MaXXXine (A24) 2,370 (-80) theaters, Fri $696K, Sat $786K Sun $589K 3-day $2.07M (-69%) Total $11.7M/Wk 2
9.) Indian 2 (FDN) 525 thaeters, Fri $1.3M Sat $363K Sun $225K 3-day $1.96M/Wk 1
10.) Sound of Hope (Angel) Fri $409K Sat $547K Sun $383K 3-day $1.34M (-56%), Total $9.76M/Wk 2
11.) Lion King (re) 1,300 theaters, Fri $418K, Sat $357K Sun $301K 3-day $1.08M/Wk 1