Long Range Forecast: Sony Makes a Play for Pre-Thanksgiving Audiences with Robert Zemeckis’ HERE

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Long Range Forecast — November 1, 2024

Here | Sony
Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $10M – $15M

Once a dominant force in pop culture, director Robert Zemeckis has enjoyed a varied career that’s seen him tackle groundbreaking special effects work (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Polar Express), performance-driven drama (Flight, Cast Away), quirky comedy/dramas (Death Becomes Her, Romancing the Stone), and more. A prolific writer, director, and producer, Zemeckis has stayed busy through the last two decades, though his directorial efforts over that time have been largely lacking in staying power—both in term of box office and the overall cultural conversation. Zemeckis returns to theaters in November with Here, a multi-generational drama set entirely in a living room, with a fixed camera providing one unchanging, static POV.

Thus far, marketing for Here has been heavy on the “Forrest Gump reunion” angle, capitalizing on the presence of Zemeckis, co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, and several key below-the-line members of the Gump crew, including composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess. The demographic most likely to respond favorably to the Gump comparison (namely, older moviegoers) has yet to return to theaters in the same quantity as they did pre-pandemic, making Sony’s decision to give Here a wide release as opposed to their earlier plan for a slow theatrical roll-out a potentially risky one. Still, Here‘s prospective audience isn’t one that tends to buy tickets well in advance, making pre-sales data more unreliable as a forecasting method than it would be for, say, a superhero movie.

Another angle to consider is Here‘s use of CGI to age and de-age Hanks and Wright, who play the same characters over a period of several decades. What could be a canny play for Boomer nostalgia—”Come see Tom Hanks looking like he did in Bosom Buddies!”—could also be a box office liability a drift into the Uncanny Valley alienates potential moviegoers.

An opening in the $10M-$15M range would place Here roughly in line with Zemeckis’ WWII spy drama Allied ($12.7M), released over Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. A more optimistic (and unlikely) comp among the director’s filmography would be 2012’s Flight, released on the first week of November to a debut gross of $24.9M.

Among post-2020 dramas given a wide theatrical release during the month of November are Napoleon ($20.6M domestic opening, $61.5M domestic total), King Richard ($5.4M domestic opening, $15.1M domestic total), House of Gucci ($14.4M domestic opening, $53.8M domestic total), and—from Columbia, a division of Sony—Devotion ($5.9M domestic opening, $20.5M domestic total). Of those, only King Richard came out before Thanksgiving. If Here is to maintain a sizeable audience through that holiday, its biggest competition for adult audiences will likely be Gladiator II (November 22), though more family-friendly titles like Wicked Part 1 (Universal), Red One (Amazon/MGM), and Moana 2 (Disney) could also siphon audiences away.

Tracking Updates [as of 10/4]

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