National Cinema Day did 8.5 million admissions we hear off of a Sunday total day box office that’s estimated around $34M. All tickets for all movies and showtimes were $4 vs. last year’s $3. Note this figure could go up later today once final numbers are tabulated.
Last year’s National Cinema Day drew 8.1M. The exhibitor celebratory day to get people back in seats fell on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend last year. The whole gist behind National Cinema Day was to drive people to movie theaters in order to shake off their COVID jitters and to drive attendance to movie houses when there was no product in them. This year was different: A lot of tentpoles with Warner Bros.’ sixth weekend of Barbie at $15.1M warring with Sony’s first wide weekend of Gran Turismo ($17.4M) after the latter included nine days of advance sneak previews in their opening Friday.
As we told you earlier, Barbie beat Gran Turismo in admissions on Sunday, 1.42M to 1.17M. Warners was projecting that they’d do 1.937M on Barbie yesterday.
Both pics’ saw surges in their Sunday box office over Saturday due to National Cinema Day: Barbie‘s at $5.7M, +6%; Gran Turismo‘s at $4.7M, +15%.
Exits for Gran Turismo have been amazing at 5 stars on PostTrak and an A CinemaScore; the pic being an underdog story with Seabiscuit and Rudy vibe.
EntTelligence reported that Barbie has clocked over 50M tickets sold during her domestic run. The pic’s total running cume stands at $7.2M shy of the $600M mark. Barbie is expected to topple Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two $1.34 billion global total today as Warner Bros.’ highest grossing movie ever in the history of the movie business.
We’ll have more updates on National Cinema Day as they come.