With the odd exception like “The Many Saints of Newark,” the most telling thing about Warner Bros. Pictures experiment with theatrical-day-and-date releases on HBO Max this past year has been its synchronicity.
The films that have generally had the best early box-office for Warners have also been the ones that fared the best in terms of HBO Max viewership. Those that got off to a poor start in terms of ticket sales saw little turnout for them on HBO Max.
That has stayed true with the release of the final title in the plan with “The Matrix Resurrections” last week. The film came in with just over half of early projections at the box-office, pulling in a five-day opening of just $22.5 million – the lowest of the franchise to date.
Analytics firm Samba TV, which measures streaming viewership across 46 million TV devices and a panel of 3 million Smart TV households, says the result wasn’t that far off with 2.8 million smart TV U.S. households tuning in over the Wednesday-Sunday period.
That is behind the 3.8 million and 3.6 million households who tuned into “Mortal Kombat” and “Godzilla vs. Kong” respectively in their first five days. In fact, the new ‘Matrix’ is on par with James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” which nabbed 2.8 million HBO Max viewers in its first weekend.
Mixed reviews and the rise of the Omicron variant also had a big impact, but one element which definitely hit the film’s bottom line – piracy. Thanks to a clean copy of the movie being available, it took a 32.6% share of the top ten torrents for the Christmas week – outpacing camcorded “Spider-Man: No Way Home” bootleg prints by nearly three-to-one according to analytics firm MUSO.
“The Matrix Resurrections” is in cinemas and on HBO Max now.
Source: Deadline
