BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE Looks Big. How Big Is Harder To Say.

What do DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE and BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE have in common? Both are showing record levels of interest. At two weeks out, DEADPOOL has the highest level of interest of any film over the past three years. And, at eight weeks out, BEETLEJUICE has the second highest level of interest behind, you guessed it, DEADPOOL.

In other words, both these films look big. As of July 12th, The Quorum was projecting an opening in the $170M – $210 range for DEADPOOL (down slightly from our projection a month ago). But what about BEETLEJUICE? What kind of opening can we expect for the 40-years-in-making-sequel? That’s a harder question.

BEETLEJUICE is opening the week after Labor Day. For years, September represented the post-summer slowdown at the box office. Kids go back to school. Vacations are over, and fewer movie tickets are sold. At least that’s the way it used to be.

In 2017, Warner Bros. reinvented the past Labor Day frame with IT, a horror film that crushed the record for the largest September opening weekend with a $123M haul. The table below lists the ten September films with the largest opening weekends. Before that, the largest September debut belonged to HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2, which debuted to $48M a few years earlier.

Two years later, Warners got close to the $100M mark on that same post-Labor Day weekend when IT CHAPTER TWO launched to $91M. In between IT films, the studio propelled THE NUN to a $54M opening, which is still the largest debut for any movie from the CONJURING universe.

So, yes, Warner Bros has owned this frame, almost entirely with big horror releases. The pandemic put a pause on the weekend, but now the studio is looking to leverage early September with BEETLEJUICE, which takes a much more family-friendly approach to the weekend.

Looking at the list of September openings, once you get past the horror films and Marvel’s SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS, the openings fall below $40M.

Is that what we should expect for BEETLEJUICE since it’s not a horror or a superhero film? Probably not. The tracking is far too strong to suggest an opening south of $40M. So where will it land?

That’s the great challenge when faced with a film that doesn’t have great historical comps and is tracking like an outlier. The Quorum issues its first official projection once a movie is six weeks from release, so we’re still a bit away from that. But given the enormously high levels of unaided awareness, total awareness, and interest, it’s reasonable to think that BEETELJUICE could perform near the top of September releases.

Could BEETLEJUICE be just the second September release to open above $100M? It’s no guarantee, at the same time, we’re not ready to rule it out.