‘Freaky’ (And Various Christmas Movie Favs) Rules The VOD Charts

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Blumhouse’s Freaky is lording over the VOD charts over at Fandango and Vudu (from last Monday to this past Sunday), while it currently tops Amazon
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. Amusingly enough, it’s currently in ninth place over at Google
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Play behind four Christmas flicks (Will Ferrell’s Elf, Mel Gibson’s Fatman, Illumination’s The Grinch and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) and Iron Mask (co-starring Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger), Universal’s own Let Him Go, The New Mutants and Buddy Games.

Meanwhile, over at iTunes, all seven of the top rentals are Christmas flicks, with an additional 12 such holiday titles making up the rest of the top 30 titles. That’s 19/30 for Christmas over at iTunes, so kudos to everything from Elf, The Polar Express and Christmas Office Party to Die Hard, Home Alone and Fatman. Rank only matters now because numbers are in such short supply, but I will be bemused if Universal’s game-changing PVOD plan gets sideswiped, at least initially, by a deluge of comfort-watch Christmas movies.

How Freaky, which opened in theaters just 25 days ago, along with the likes of Unhinged, The New Mutants, The War with Grandpa and (obviously) Tenet will perform in their post-theatrical afterlives will be of some value in terms of the current situation. Throw in Honest Thief, which debuts on “priced to buy” EST this morning. Their at-home debuts will presumably/hopefully garner more revenue than the norm from folks who wanted to see them in theaters but either couldn’t or didn’t feel safe doing so.

That goes double for Comcast’s
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Universal/Focus flicks that have popped up on “$20-per-rental” PVOD just weeks after their theatrical debuts. I expect Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s (terrific) Let Him Go to stick around for a while, especially on Amazon where Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone still rules with an iron fist. It would be nice if Universal (or any of the studios) would give us numbers for these streaming/VOD titles, especially if they are trying to center streaming as the distribution network of choice.

I’d wager that the kind of folks who otherwise would wait to see Freaky until it came to “priced to rent for around $5” VOD are going to do likewise now that it’s “$20 for PVOD.” If they can/would have waited until it was cheap to rent back in the before-times, they may do likewise now as well. For the record, Vudu and Fandango rank their films by raw revenue, rather than by transactions, so logically the $20-a-pop rentals will have an advantage over the $6-per-rental titles.

Nonetheless, Freaky is the first of these Comcast PVOD flicks that almost certainly would have been a solid theatrical hit had it opened in conventional times. It had decent reviews, a strong pitch (body swap horror comedy), two well-liked leads (Katherine Newton and Vince Vaughn) and a (relatively speaking) marquee filmmaker in Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon. Whether it would have performed like Happy Death Day ($56 million domestic and $125 million worldwide) or Happy Death Day 2 U ($28 million/$64 million), we’re talking about a $5 million flick, so either scenario might have been positive.

Point being, unlike The High Note, You Should Have Left or Irresistible, Freaky is the kind of movie that would have had an honest chance of breaking out as a conventional theatrical release. As such, it stands to reason that more folks will sample it (either for $20 or later for $6) who otherwise would have seen it theatrically.

This PVOD strategy, especially for “not safe for kids” flicks, may only play to that specific demographic that otherwise would have been in theaters on opening weekend but didn’t see the movie on opening weekend due to Covid concerns. The question, and it is a question, is whether audiences who otherwise would have not seen Let Him Go or Freaky in theaters will now shell out $20, more than almost any non-IMAX movie ticket in America, to see the film in high-quality streaming from the comfort of home?