Val Morgan reports biggest opening weekend since January 2020
New figures from Val Morgan Cinema have reported that over one million Australians visited a cinema over the past weekend, in turn delivering the biggest opening weekend, and non-holiday week for numbers since January 2020.
This represents an improvement on the Easter (1-7 April) figures this this year, which at the time delivered the best full week performance since January 2020, with 1.6 million Australians visiting the cinema over the Easter week. The entire April holiday period delivered 4.1 million admits, with the weekly average over the period 37% higher than during the summer school holidays.
This last week beats out the previous largest non-holiday opening since the pandemic, with Fast & Furious 9’s release last month delivering a 4-day audience of 895,000, cracking 2019-levels for the first time.
The release of Marvel’s Black Widow and the reboot of Space Jam helped box office results see a 47% week-on-week rise, despite Sydney and parts of New South Wales still remaining in lockdown.
The numbers show that 52% of those that viewed Black Widow were between 18-39, proving cinema’s ability to connect with the difficult young audiences.
Val Morgan predicts these figures to continue to rise as more blockbuster titles are in the pipeline for release in the coming months. This follows delays of major films, with Val Morgan stating that there is over a years’ worth of content to be packed into the second half of the year, commenting that it is “the best future slate cinema has ever seen”.
Marvel Studios’ Black Widow
Val Morgan Cinema managing director, Guy Burbidge said: “These incredible results were delivered despite Sydney languishing in a temporary lockdown. To put this into perspective, if Sydney cinemas had been layered into these results, we would be looking at 2,000,000 admissions for the week, a level +125% up on 2019 average audiences.”
LeBron James and Bugs Bunny in Space Jam: A New Legacy
The weekend’s numbers were also aided by the reboot of the Space Jam title, with the NBA’s LeBron James starring in the lead role in A New Legacy, following the 1996 original.
Burbidge continued: “We’ve seen very encouraging results over the last couple of months with Godzilla vs Kong, Fast & Furious 9, and now Black Widow. July marks the month where cinema’s content floodgates burst open and we have enormous confidence that these numbers will only grow as we move into huge titles like The Suicide Squad, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, No Time To Die, Dune, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Top Gun: Maverick, Matrix 4, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
“Whilst the weekend’s numbers impressed overall, cinema yet again proved the fact that it is still the best place to connect with hard-to-reach youth audiences, as Black Widow demonstrated the continued strength of the 18-39 demographic, with over 52% of the audience coming from this hard-to-reach cohort. This is what hot demand in this demographic looks like.”
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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