Eric Handler: Last News

box office returns. It’s also less relevant and more imperiled, forced to compete with an endless array of streaming services. There’s a sense that a few bad breaks could extinguish an art form that’s been built over generations.

box office are due to higher ticket prices,” says Eric Handler, managing director at Roth Capital Partners. “Theaters need to do a better job of promoting the cinema experience and getting people to come back.” Over the past few years, the movie business has suffered one setback after another. First, COVID shuttered theaters for months, prompting a wave of release-date delays, and halted filming on major movies, which only resumed with costly new health measures in place that added millions to budgets.

Movie theater stocks moved higher Monday in the wake of the biggest Thanksgiving ever at the domestic box office.

Red One,” Dwayne Johnson’s Yuletide action extravaganza with a gargantuan $250 million budget, a sign of where the movie business is headed or a relic from its free-spending, streaming wars past? After the movie opened last weekend in the U.S. to a less-than-festive $32 million (revised downward from an estimated $34 million on Sunday), folks close to Amazon, the e-retailer turned aspiring media giant, insisted the movie was successful.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter In 2020, during the peak of the entertainment industry’s love affair with streaming, a follow-up to Disney‘s animated hit “Moana” was destined to become a television series for Disney+. But like the movie’s shapeshifting demigod Maui, who traverses the seven seas with the eponymous Polynesian warrior, the project has transformed into something entirely new.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Apple’s first major theatrical release, has generated $120 million globally after three weekends of release. Is that a good result for a movie backed by a streaming service? A terrible outcome for a glowingly received, $200 million crime epic directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro? Or somewhere in between? Everyone who follows the movie business has a different take, so parsing these ticket sales could take longer than the film’s daunting three-hour-and-26-minute run time.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” And Logan, who owns Logan Luxury Theatres in rural South Dakota, is back in the black after enduring two years where profits vanished while studios failed to furnish enough big movies to play. “It’s nice,” he says. “We don’t have to reassure our bankers every time we meet for coffee.” Logan’s theaters aren’t the only ones experiencing a dramatic change of fortunes. Overall, the domestic box office stands at $2.3 billion, up 36.8% from the same period last year and an astounding 589.5% improvement over 2021, according to Comscore. The exhibition industry is finally looking like its pre-pandemic self again. That’s partly attributable to studios releasing new installments of successful franchises, but it is also linked to a shift in attitude among the major media companies when assessing the value of a theatrical release.

After another solid weekend at the box office, several Wall Street analysts have issued upbeat outlooks on the exhibition sector, calling for a robust moviegoing rebound from Covid-19 in 2022.

By Dave McNary

By Dade Hayes