HAIKYU!! THE DUMPSTER BATTLE | IN A VIOLENT NATURE openings | May and year-to-date 2024 moviegoing | May 31 to June 2, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The Current weekend: May 31 to June 2, 2024
On this weekend last year, Across the Spider-Verse and Boogeyman opened to a combined $133m. In 2022, Top Gun: Maverick made $90m in its 2nd weekend. And in 2021, during the pandemic, A Quiet Place 2 plus Cruella did $69m.
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This weekend is another example of a lineup disrupted by the pandemic and labor strikes. It takes 18 to 24 months to plan, produce and market the biggest movies, so it’s going to take another year to get past this inconsistency. There is no way around it.
1) Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle opening
- This is a small opening for a CrunchyRoll anime release. CrunchyRoll anime is almost entirely action-based. This story is one of the exceptions — it’s a high school sports drama — and the distribution footprint is narrower. Critics’ reviews are very good but not on the level of recent anime films.
These movies play fast to their dedicated fan-base — they average a low 2.2x multiple. As with all anime, Haikyu arrives in No. America after an extremely successful run in Japan and Asia (the picture is going to make 90% of its money overseas):
- CrunchyRoll has another sports theme anime opening on June 28 (Blue Lock The Movie).
2) In a Violent Nature opening
- This is a fair opening for an indie horror title. The accomplishment here is putting a micro-budget production on a big stage, so it’s already a win for this Canadian picture that premiered at Sundance. If the film holds domestically and/or gets traction overseas, it’s a bigger win. Critics’ reviews are excellent:
3) May and year-to-date 2024 moviegoing
- The May domestic box office was down -43.3% compared with the pre-pandemic average (the average of May 2019/2018/2017). Year-to-date, January-thru-May is now down -43.1%.
Compared with last year, the month was down -31.4%, and down -24.7% year-to-date:
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes opened well and is performing on the level of the series’s recent sequels, and IF and Garfield both opened solidly. But the month got very little support from holdover business. With The Fall Guy and Furiosa missing, May fell apart.
Pre-pandemic Mays included Aladdin/live-action (2019, $1.05 billion worldwide), Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017, $864m), Pirates of the Caribbean 5 (2017, $795m), and Deadpool 2 (2018, $779m). And May 2023 had Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ($846m), and Fast & Furious X ($705m). Giant movies.
Looking ahead, June
- Starting next week, June has Bad Boys 4, Inside Out 2, A Quiet Place 3 and the first of Kevin Costner’s Horizon two-movie Western series. But we’ll also have another soft summer weekend on June 21, and so…
June comparisons to pre-pandemic years will continue to be very tough. Pre-pandemic Junes had Jurassic World 5 (2018, $1.31 billion worldwide), Incredibles 2 (2018, $1.24b), Toy Story 4 (2019, $1.1b), and Despicable Me 3 (2017, $1.03b). Juggernaut numbers.
Comparisons to last year will fare better — June 2023 had Spider-Verse 2 ($691m), Elemental ($496m), and Transformers 7 ($439m).
Inside Out 2 opens in two weeks, the 1st film finished with $858m worldwide in June 2015, 58.4% of it from overseas
- Moviegoing thrives on momentum and rhythm: one strong movie after another bringing fans to the multiplex once or more per month. Right now, the schedule is thin, several big releases fell short, and the original stories are not breaking through (with the exception of IF).
Bad Boys 4, Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place 3 in June, and Despicable Me 4 and Deadpool 3 in July, have the potential to shake it up — hopefully they will.
[*Note: For our box office comparisons, we take the complete weeks of each month (each week runs Friday to Thursday) and we line up the same weeks across the years, so we are comparing the same days, same weeks and same day-mix, like apples-to-apples. There are different ways to do this and you might see slightly different industry numbers — this is how we like to do it.]