Movie 2018 Summer TV Spending Down, Box Office Revenues Higher
- by Wayne Friedman , June 15, 2018
Although national TV spending for big summer movies currently is sharply lower, U.S. box office revenues are slightly higher so far.
This year, for the two-and-a-half-month period from April 1 though June 15, national movie TV spending from the movie studios (not including consumer marketing partnerships) totaled $363.1 million, according to iSpot.tv. A year ago it was $505.6 million for the period.
In contrast, current summer box office revenues are up 1.6% to $1.29 billion from May 1 through June 13 versus the same period a year ago, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. For the second quarter, April to June, U.S. box office revenues are 13% higher to $2.4 billion.
Summer movies typically ramp up media spending about four to six weeks before debuting.
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The number one movie for the summer season-to-date this year is Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($319.8 million); a year ago, Walt Disney Buena Vista’s “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” was tops ($368.3 million).
This year the biggest individual films in terms of national TV media spending are Lucasfilm’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, at $25.2 million; Disney-Pixar’s “Incredibles 2”, at $23.5 million; Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War”, at $21.2 million; Universal’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”, at $21.2 million; and Fox’s “Deadpool 2”, at $21.1 million.
Much of this money during this period went into NBA Basketball, including the NBA Finals, NBC’s “The Voice”, AMC’s “The Walking Dead”,
and Fox, "Family Guy."
The Biggest studio spenders are Universal, at $67.0 million; followed by Warner Bros. $62.9 million; Paramount, $29.0 million; Disney Marvel, $27.7 million; Disney Lucasfilm, $25.3 million; Disney-Pixar $23.5 million; Sony’s Columbia Pictures, $21.5 million; Global Road, $23.3 million; and Fox, $22.1 million.
Universal and Warner Bros. had the most airings of movie commercial so far -- with 8,485 and 8,455, respectively. The next seven studios are in range of 3,200 to 4,500 each.
In summer 2017, there was nine movies spending over $20 million in the same period -- with the Universal’s “The Mummy” the big spender at $32.3 million, and Fox’ “Alien: Covenant”, at $26.1 million.
I am seeing that the Avengers movie did $658 million domestically so far. Article says $319 million. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=marvel0518.htm
If you look at just Marvel/Disney, they had a releatively small TV spend as stated but their two releases this year did over $1.2 billion in domestic ticketing.
I look at the number of trailer plays online and see that those Black Panther and Avengers movies trailers and clip content had hundreds of millions of plays. The return on that free marketing must be worth 10x the TV Spend dollars in reach numbers.
The movie studios understand this correlation of how having trailers online can lead to excitement about a new movie. However, I find that many TV networks do a poor job in comparison with their TV content. With so many new TV shows, how are users finding out about them? If there is not an active push online to drive viewership and you try and keep your promotional assets only available on your channels, good luck.
Didn't the product person at Netflix just say how previews help their members "browse less and discover new content more quickly." I would think every network and streaming service should heed this logic and use all the free online promotion avenues available to them to lift their programs out of the sea of content all angling for the same eyeballs.