Alternate Box Office Thread

Hello fellow Hollywood box office folk. Long before I worked on a movie set I was obsessed with box office… if I had any idea what email I had used for that fantasy box office thing decade and a half ago I’d probably have a ton of fake money in there lol.

As @Andrew T did brilliantly in the much missed Dirty Laundry timeline let’s figure out effects of missing movies, added movies, different movies and how this effects that weekend in box office and perhaps beyond!

For fun let’s remove a movie that released three days before I was born: Explorers. Directed by of Gremlin fame Joe Dante and starring such people as River Phoenix it opened with a huge paltry 3.6 million… good enough for sixth place. What do SF folk who watched that movie go see? Why almost certainly Back to the Future—perhaps enough to make it that rare film that does better in weekend 2. Or maybe all of them wanna see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and that movie narrowly takes the weekend and therefore we probably see Mad Max 4 a few decades earlier than OTL….
 
Yeah, I think BttF is probably the big winner for that week. The week after is a little more interesting, since that's the re-release of ET. I wonder if having a couple of thousand more people go to Back To The Future during week 2 coupled with the Explorers audience being almost tailor-made to be transplanted directly into the ET coffers would be enough to take it out of number 1.

My entry into this thought experiment is one that I've been planning on making a time line on if I ever get the willpower and can be bothered to actually research. I figure I might as well put it here in case I never get around to it.

So the week is July 27-29, 1990. A movie named Problem Child comes out, does really well as counter-programming with the only real challenge for the family audience being a re-release of The Jungle Book, and winds up 7th for the year for PG releases despite critical savaging. But what if it was delayed for one week, for any reason you can think of, and instead a movie that would come out the following week takes its place instead: DuckTales?
 
Top