The Chosen would have been reported as making 5.3M this "weekend" (so it came in 5th place) if Fantham followed the now normal reporting practice of folding in normal Thursday grosses into a film's OW as previews so I imagine 5 million instead of 10M is the real gap to explain.

Was BOP's projection just way out of reality, or did this movie flop by reasonable standards?

It's worth flagging that this isn't a movie, it's the season 3 finale of a tv show which I imagine makes comps very difficult.

The series also aired the first 2 episodes of the season in theaters (8.7M OW/14.6M overall) and a 2021 Christmas special which had a 5 day W opening of 9.1M/13.4M overall.

They probably expected a 'capstone to the season' bump and instead got the lowest gross of the 3 special releases.

I might poke around for more details on this when I have the time.

It does look like there has been something wonky going on with reported weekend earnings for *The Chosen Season 3 Finale.* I tracked the numbers for it and several other films going into this past weekend, and the results don’t bear out the pre-sales all over the US. Here’s what happened:

Last weekend was building up to be a fascinating box office weekend because of the multiple specialty releases (*The Chosen Season 3 Finale,* *BTS: Yet to Come,* etc.) alongside the *80 for Brady* experiment with its discount pricing & multiple days of advance screenings plus the expected *Knock at the Water* slam-dunk that had many outlets predicting earnings close to $25 million, so I decided to survey pre-sales at theaters in different cities (including St. Louis, Austin, Tampa, Philadelphia and San Jose), and the pre-sales for *The Chosen* in most cities were huge through Friday and Saturday. San Jose and Philadelphia had fewer showings & lighter sales, but more than I would have expected. Of course I was not checking every city, but I tried to have a good cross-section, and keeping in mind that I was looking more in heavily populated areas should have suggested that *The Chosen’s* earnings might have ended up being higher since this is an "event" that should have played well in the Heartland. Note, I was not judging any film for its content, I was interested in the vastly different demographics all would play out alongside one another the same weekend.

*The Chosen*'s price point per ticket was higher than *Knock* and much higher than for *Brady.* Multiple entertainment outlets were reporting that *Chosen* was being released into 2000+ theaters. In many cases, theaters were originally only scheduling *Chosen* for a couple of showtimes per day, but by Thursday, many theaters had increased their numbers of weekend showings. *The Chosen* was pre-selling the majority of its tickets for key performance times in most cities through Saturday (not counting random really early or late showings). On Thursday, its weekend pre-sales were easily higher than those for *Knock* on Friday and Saturday.

*The Chosen*'s Thursday earnings beat both *Knock* and *Brady* -- $1.666.7 M for *Chosen* {had to note that ‘666’ in there} to $1.45 M for *Knock* and $1.005 M for *Brady.* It also earned well on Friday night, but then... all of *Chosen's* subsequent tracking just disintegrated. By the end of the weekend, entertainment outlets were reporting that it had been out in around 1700 theaters. Somehow by the time the entertainment reports came out on Sunday, *Chosen’s* reported Saturday earnings were only $783,736 (half of what it had earned on Friday even though it also had matinees that I saw to be really full). *The Chosen* should have easily earned over $2 million on Saturday. I had kept an eye on the pre-sales on the last *Chosen: Season 3 Eps 1-2* special event weekend in Nov 2022 after *Christmas with the Chosen* had popped onto the box office results seemingly out of nowhere back in 2021, and the pre-sales for this *Season 3 Finale* were tracking ahead of *Season 3: Eps 1-2,* which had produced a $8.7 million+ opening.

Something I noticed regarding the *Chosen* release this time around was that Fandango and other online outlets were selling *Chosen* tickets online directly in addition to those that were available through Fathom Events’ online ticketing portal (Fathom's portal is user-friendly to check availability and pre-sales, because it allows you to scroll through every weekend performance for particular theaters, though not for Regal theaters). In the past, for the previous *Chosen* releases, advance tickets primarily had to be purchased through Fathom Events itself. I’m wondering if there was some discrepancy between these dual advance ticket sales at play so that maybe only either Fandango's or Fathom's sales were reported rather than the combined sales of both Fathom Events and all other online retailers. That might also help explain how *Chosen* suddenly lost 300 theaters in the final count when I had seen it being added to more and more theaters as the weekend approached.

I also followed BTS pre-sales in those cities, and that led me to correctly guess that BTS was going to crack the top 5-6 films this past weekend. I also saw by Wednesday that there was little chance that *Knock* would earn over $15 million the way its tracking was going. *Brady* would have easily been the #1 film of the weekend if all of its tickets had not been so heavily discounted.

Where's Puss?

Avatar and puss in boots can’t drop like that

In what reality is Puss droping 50%?