The last time it was this low, according to Comscore, was the weekend of Sept. 11-13, 1998, with $56.8M. This was at a time when the early September period was a place for non-event titles at the box office.

Even the time frame following Sept. 11, 2001, fared better at the box office, with the weekend of Sept. 21-23 grossing $59.7M.  Box Office analysts believe that this weekend's wide entries of I Still Believe, The Hunt, and Bloodshot underperformed somewhere between 15% to 35% from where they were forecast to come in. Overall, the 3-day weekend looks to be off 42% from last weekend's take of $100.7M. There is one optimist out there who believes if we can get to $19M today, then this weekend could possibly touch $70M. But that all depends on whether the regular Saturday bump occurs.

While last week's box office was clearly immune to the breaking coronavirus headlines posting $134M (March 6-12), +4% from the previous week, everyone is distracted. Most exhibitors I spoke with yesterday agree with the majors that it was a wise move to postpone big movies like A Quiet Place Part II, Mulan, No Time to Die, etc. There's no way to cut through this noise and get people into theaters, as they're lining up at Walmart and big box stores in the early AM to empty store shelves.

While a majority of the big chains are staying open and working with new policies that maintain no more than a 50% capacity in each auditorium, there's roughly 84 theaters that have shuttered across Canada and the US, as they either can't pay their employees, given the low foot traffic, or due to local ordinances, which is the case for several venues in Pennsylvania like the Regal King of Prussia 17, Regal Oaks Stadium 24 and Regal Plymouth 10 in Conshohocken, PA.