Long Range Forecast: Christmas Comes Early with Amazon MGM’s RED ONE

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Long Range Forecast — November 15, 2024

Red One | Amazon MGM

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $20M – $40M

Amazon MGM gets into the holiday spirit with Red One, a Christmas action/comedy that sees Dwayne Johnson—playing the North Pole’s head of security in the wake of Santa’s kidnapping—reteam with Jumanji and Jumanji: The Next Level ($59.2M domestic opening, $316.8M domestic total) director Jake Kasdan. Released just before Christmas 2018, Jumanji would eventually become the fourth-highest domestic earner ($404.5M) from that year, enjoying a staying power that kept it in theaters through the following year’s Memorial Day weekend. Though Jumanji‘s $36.1M opening is within our forecasting panel’s range for Red One, it remains to be seen whether reviews and word of mouth will be positive enough for a leggy run—and, of course, as a Christmas title, it’s unlikely to hang around in theaters as long as Jumanji did.

That’s especially true given Jumanji was released by Sony, the one major studio without its own streaming platform, and Red One hits theaters courtesy of a distributor owned by a streaming company. Since acquiring MGM in 2022, Amazon has had luck with using a theatrical run to propel awareness past a film’s PVOD debut; this April’s Challengers ($15M domestic opening, $50.1M domestic total), for example, earned just over $8.6M in theaters after its May 17 home video debut. It didn’t hit Amazon’s streaming platform until September, well after the film’s theatrical run had already ended. Blink Twice ($7.3M domestic opening, $23M domestic total) opened in late August and remained in theaters through the beginning of October, about a week after its PVOD debut on September 27. Being a family-friendly Christmas romp, Red One is very different from those two adult-skewing, arthouse-y titles. But if it lives up to its potential as a standout holiday performer, Amazon MGM could very well opt not to snatch it from theaters immediately following its PVOD debut—the date of which is TBA but will surely take place well before December 25, allowing parents of young children to pay PVOD prices to rent or buy it while their kids are out of school.

Exactly how Amazon MGM treats this title in terms of theatrical exclusivity will be instructive for future titles, particularly their summer 2026 Masters of the Universe reboot, as the distributor’s theatrically released films to this point have all been geared towards adult audiences–an incomplete list includes Challengers, Blink Twice, last year’s there-and-gone historical drama The Boys in the Boat; Jason Statham’s eco-terrorism actioner The Beekeeper; erotic thriller Saltburn; and awards contender American Fiction. A comparison with 2020’s The Christmas Chronicles 2, starring Kurt Russell as Santa, would be helpful in forecasting Red One…. but that film was released by Netflix, so even though it did get a limited theatrical run in advance of its November 25 streaming debut, there are no official box office numbers to cite. (And, regardless, the difference between November 2024 and November 2020, when cinemas were fighting through the thick of the pandemic, is too sizable to lend itself to direct comparisons.)

Tracking Updates [as of 10/16]

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