In the Heights had around half the opening-weekend HBO Max viewership as Angelina Jolie's Those Who Wish Me Dead last month.
SambaTV is reporting that In the Heights, which opened with a deeply disappointing $11.4 million in North American theaters this weekend, also had a pretty soft “opening weekend” on HBO Max as well. The Jon M. Chu-directed adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s 2009 Broadway play notched just 696,000 viewers on the streaming platform. Now, for the record, SambaTV only measures, at least in regard to this specific stat, North American viewers watching a given piece of streaming content on a “smart TV.” So, no, it doesn’t account for phones, laptops and desktops. But just by virtue of that specific stat, it’s a pretty damn low figure for a big “day and date” HBO Max/theaters premiere.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It earned $24 million in its domestic debut the previous weekend while nabbing an estimated 1.6 million viewers on the streaming site. Cruella notched 686,000 viewers over its opening weekend on Disney+ while it earned $26 million theatrically. A) Folks had to pay $30 to lease that Emma Stone flick and B) I wasn’t exactly popping champagne about the Cruella viewership either. It was just over half the 1.1 million viewers who leased Mulan over Labor Day weekend last year. 1.2 million viewers watched the far lower-profile Angelina Jolie-led thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead when it premiered in theaters and on HBO Max exactly a month ago.
I could go through a list of recent high-profile streaming premieres (2.3 million for Without Remorse, 3.8 million for Mortal Kombat, 3.6 million for Godzilla Vs. Kong and 2.2 million for Wonder Woman 1984), but you get the idea. With the important caveat that SambaTV only measures a specific portion of a film or television show’s streaming viewership, the variable-to-variable comparison is beyond wanting. Come what may, getting essentially half the viewership of Those Who Want Me Dead is not a good result. Although, to be clear, the generally small size of the viewership numbers in play just highlights once again how streaming is generally chasing numbers that would spell disaster for any network TV show or theatrical movie.
We got word last week that Loki’s debut episode had the biggest single-day viewership for any Disney+ premiere yet. That’s great news, but the actual raw figure was around 890,000 households. Okay, fine, but playing apples to oranges for a moment, 890k x $9.37 (the cost of an average movie ticket) would be around $8.4 million. Even if you acknowledge that a household could be a party of one (one $9.37 ticket) or a family of five (around $50 in tickets), that would be a miserable result for the opening day for any MCU movie, even (happy 13th birthday) The Incredible Hulk which opened with “just” $21.5 million in 2008 for a $55 million domestic weekend launch.
Periodic declarations from Netflix that their newest movie or TV show will be viewed around 55 million times in the first month notwithstanding, the streaming viewership on a case-by-case basis isn’t exactly reaching blockbuster levels thus far. Now streaming services are subscription-based, so as long as the subscriber numbers go up (and, once they reach a relative plateau, don’t decline), then it’s almost immaterial as to whether anyone watches a given movie or television show.
In what has become a pattern of sorts when a movie that we online nerds hope will be a hit turns out not to be a hit (Widows, Birds of Prey, etc.), we are constantly trying to find a reason beyond the fact that audiences didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t the marketing, it obviously wasn’t the HBO Max factor, it wasn’t competition and it wasn’t entirely the pandemic. A well-reviewed, inclusive, non-franchise, star-free, big studio theatrical release underwhelmed because what we say we want isn’t always what general audiences want. The good news is that it won’t prevent the next In the Heights from getting made, only perhaps the next such film from premiering in theaters.
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June 15, 2021 at 05:00AM
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‘In The Heights’ Disappointed In Theaters And On HBO Max - Forbes
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