HOLLYWOOD STOCK EXCHANGE
THE ENTERTAINMENT MARKET
THE ENTERTAINMENT MARKET
Things have changed to a certain extent around the holidays. A couple reasons.
You will always see long time players referencing the way things used to be regarding in play stocks over the Christmas break.
Prior to the pandemic, it was a consistently winning play to hold these stocks long once the initial reaction to opening weekend passed. The reason was simple. During the holiday break between Christmas day and New year's day, every single calendar day acted like a Saturday. The week days between the 25th and the 1st would be much, much larger than a typical, slow week day. This would cause films with wide screen counts to far exceed their formulaic delist forecast.
There are many stories of players holding holiday movie stocks long and seeing the grosses go up and up and up. Huge profits for players. Good times.
But obviously things have changed significantly.
First: you need movies to be successful; people have to buy tickets for that to happen. And in the post pandemic environment, that's not happening nearly as much as it used to. Just look at several of these holiday movies this year. Ferrari, Anyone But You, Iron Claw. Not enough ticket sales to make that significant of an impact to the overall delist price. And the movies were OVERPRICED prior to the release date. The pandemic has changed how the general public attends movies (they simply don't go as much, or as often, as in the past). That's changed how these movie stocks perform over the holiday break.
We're seeing some potential for over performance out of Wonka, Migration, and Boys in the Boat. So perhaps those will end up being solid LONG plays.
Look at the daily box office this last week. look at the 26th through the 28th and see how those numbers look. They look nearly as good as Christmas Day's numbers; that's what potentially would propel movies to successful long plays.
This year there are definitely a couple wild cards. The Monday Christmas day releases have had an impact on performance. And a movie like Color Purple is simply too unpredictable to know which way to hold it. I recommend watching for the daily numbers and intepreting that data as early on during each holiday day as possible, to help you with the hold strategy of these holiday releases.
I'd basically disregard the old timer's references to holiday longs going forward. If people don't turn up for a movie, if they don't have interest in a movie, they're not going, tickets don't get sold, and the long play isn't an automatic thing for these stocks any more. Only some of the movies released in the last 10 days are going to act like the solid long holiday plays of old.
Thinking next Christmas/New Year I'll approach the actual movie stocks in release a lot differently. Dec 28, 10:46
Damn straight. {nm} Dec 28, 15:51
Things have changed to a certain extent around the holidays. A couple reasons. Dec 31, 08:56
Thanks... ! Jan 04, 10:03
