Weekend estimates: The War with Grandpa pulls off surprise win

October 11, 2020

The War with Grandpa

Although the theatrical market is still in the doldrums, The War with Grandpa is providing some welcome good news this weekend with a surprise win. 101 Studios is projecting $3.608 million for the weekend, which is more than double our prediction, and wouldn’t be a particularly surprising result for a film like this from a new distributor under normal circumstances. Its performance raises some interesting questions about what films will and won’t work in theaters at the moment.

The general assumption during the pandemic has been that movies aimed at older teens and younger adults will perform better (at least compared to other films), since that demographic is the most likely to risk going to movie theaters. The relatively good performance of horror films like The Wretched, The Rental, and The New Mutants, and thrillers like Unhinged and Tenet would seem to bear that out.

Once something becomes an entrenched assumption, there’s a risk that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, though: if everyone assumes only a certain type of film will do well, that might become the only type of film that gets released (or perhaps the only type with serious marketing). That can lead to the dominance of a particular genre, even if it’s actually not any more likely to succeed than others. We have so little data to make a firm conclusion one way or another, but the over-performance of Hocus Pocus last weekend, and the win for The War with Grandpa this weekend suggests that there is an audience for family movies. (Note, however, that Coco will open with only $603,000, in spite of looking like a potential strong performer too.)

One other possibility is that the market as a whole is strengthening, and the first two films to benefit from the better conditions just happen to be family films. Our model going into the weekend estimated that moviegoer demand is running at about 28% of usual. War with Grandpa, however, reached around 66% of its expected audience, assuming the weekend estimate holds. Our model will adjust for these more encouraging numbers, and the measure of overall market strength will increase to around 40%, but our level of uncertainty will increase too, because it might just be that family films are more appealing to audiences right now. Unfortunately, the lack of family films between now and Thanksgiving means we won’t know much for a while.

Helpfully, 101 Studios shared some interesting demographic data for The War with Grandpa. The audience is 50% male, and 50% female; kids under 13 made up 30% of the audience, 13–24 ages were 17%, 25–44 was 36%, and 45 and older 17%. The audience was 40% white, 30% Latino, 8% black, 7% Asian, and 15% other. 30% of adults were attending with a child, but there was a large contingent (40%) who indicated that the draw was that the film is a comedy with Robert De Niro in a lead role. 46% of the audience said that they hadn’t returned to theaters because there hasn’t been a film that they wanted to see, which suggests that there is latent demand not being met by the types of films on offer recently.

While reviews for Grandpa have been weak, 90% of the audience gave the film a thumbs up. Audiences under 18 rated the film A- with CinemaScore, and the overall audience rating was B+. Among kids under 13, 85% would definitely recommend it. Those signs all point towards good word-of-mouth for the film. Laurent Ouaknine at 101 remarked that they are, “really pleased that 101 Studios was able to offer audiences a comedy that is bringing the whole family back to theaters.”





One final note on the international scene: Tenet will earn another $9.8 million globally this weekend for a worldwide total of $323.3 million. It has now picked up $48.3 million domestically. No other international figures have yet been announced.

- Weekend studio estimates
- Weekend predictions
- Weekend theater counts

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Hocus Pocus, Coco, The New Mutants, The War with Grandpa, Tenet, The Rental, Unhinged, The Wretched, Robert De Niro