On today’s Box Office Corner on the Daily Variety podcast, Variety’s Rebecca Rubin explained why Lionsgate’s Michael made a surprise return to No. 1 on a quiet weekend before the start of next summer’s blockbuster season, when Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu opens over Memorial Day weekend.
“The summer movie season officially opens with ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ on Memorial Day. It’s the first Star Wars movie in seven years since ‘The Rise of Skywalker,’ which made $1 billion in pre-pandemic 2019, so it’s on everyone’s radar. And, of course, a lot has changed since then, not just in terms of theatrical box office receipts and standards of film success, but in terms of Star Wars as a property,” Rubin observes. “Since then, they’ve had a lot of TV shows, but they haven’t been able to get the movie off the ground. So whether this still survives as a movie property is going to be really important. And you might be a little surprised to hear that about a series like ‘Star Wars,’ but they’ve had great success on the small screen. And they now have the added challenge of getting the younger generation to associate this series with theaters, because that’s what it’s been like in the past.” For seven years, it has been synonymous with Disney+. ”
The results proved the value of keeping movies in theaters for extended periods of time, after a quiet showing at turnstiles around the country last weekend. The Michael Jackson biopic “Michael,” produced by Lionsgate, rose to No. 1 again in its fourth weekend of release. Rubin thoroughly delves into the marketing rationale the studio developed to make “Michael” a sensation. The campaign began over a year before the movie was released in theaters.
“They knew from the beginning that this movie was going to be a crowd-pleaser, and they really tried to put effort into recreating a lot of concert performances and music videos, and they revolved all of their marketing efforts around making it feel like an event,” says Rubin. “They wanted the marketing campaign to feel like an event, so the movie felt like an event. That’s what we saw with ‘Barbie’ and ‘Wicked.'” And that’s the thing about properties these days that make people think, “Oh, you’re missing out if you don’t see this.” So Lionsgate made it clear from the beginning that this was a theatrical production that would succeed on the big screen. ”
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