The Word of Mouth Hit Is Back

Here’s what the domestic box office top ten looked like in 2024: ten films, every single one of them a sequel, a franchise installment, or a prequel. Not one original screenplay. The year before was only marginally better. The consensus in Hollywood was that the original wide-release film was dying, that the theatrical word-of-mouth hit was a relic, and that streaming had conditioned audiences to wait until you could watch it at home rather than recruit others to the theater.

And then, last year, Sinners dropped 4.9 percent on its second weekend.

We covered Coogler’s film extensively here when it arrived, but read that again: a 4.9 percent second-weekend drop is the third-best hold ever for a film opening above $40 million, trailing only Shrek and Avatar. The audience didn’t just love it. They went home and made other people go see it. By the time it finished, Sinners had earned $280 million domestically and $370 million worldwide, and the word-of-mouth hit — the kind of film that builds week over week rather than exploding on a Friday and collapsing by Sunday — was suddenly, improbably back.

And then it happened again. And again. And again.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons topped the domestic chart in four of its first five weekends and finished at $269 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. One of Them Days, the Keke Palmer/SZA buddy comedy that nobody had any particular reason to see, opened in the dead of January and spent seven weeks in the top ten, eventually grossing $50 million on a $14 million budget. Pure word of mouth. In January. In a comedy. Who says comedy is dead?

Then The Housemaid opened December 19th with a modest $19 million — the kind of number that used to suggest it would die quietly — and then … it didn’t die. It held. And held. At one point it posted a 0% weekend-over-weekend drop. BookTok was doing marketing work that Lionsgate couldn’t. The film ended its run at over $300 million worldwide on a $35 million budget.

Project Hail Mary arrived in March and turned in second and third-weekend drops of 32% and 31% respectively — great numbers for any film, let alone an original sci-fi movie starring Ryan Gosling as a schoolteacher who befriends a spider alien. Eight weeks into its run, it was still in the domestic top five and trending toward $330 million domestically, with $600 million worldwide well within reach. The Andy Weir readership did not all show up on opening weekend. They went when someone told them to go.

And then Michael — a film sitting at 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, which usually would be a death sentence — returned to number one at the domestic box office in its fourth weekend, something that hadn’t happened in six months.

None of this is happening because FOMO is dead. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened to $131 million this spring. Mortal Kombat II dropped 65% in its second weekend, which is what front-loaded brand-loyalty films do. The opening-weekend pile-on is still a thing available to audiences who want to exercise it.But there’s another option again.

The thing these films share isn’t genre or budget or review scores. It’s passion: The horror audience that found Sinners and then recruited everyone they knew; the MJ fans who couldn’t care less what a critic thinks; the BookTok folks; the Andy Weir readers who’d been waiting years for this adaptation. These films didn’t go viral in the traditional sense. They spread the old-fashioned way — person to person, week after week — except now “person to person” runs through TikTok and Reddit and group chats instead of exploding on one Friday and fading away by the next.

For three years, the industry had more or less convinced itself that the theatrical word-of-mouth hit was a pre-streaming artifact, replaced by the more efficient MCU or franchise film. And then Sinners dropped 4.9 percent on its second weekend, and One of Them Days spent seven weeks in the top ten, and The Housemaid posted a 0% drop, and a schoolteacher who befriends a spider alien has been in the top five for eight straight weeks.

Guess what? People still tell each other to go see movies. Hollywood just has to give them something worth telling people about.