During a film's theatrical run, its box office performance generally declines from weekend to weekend. In addition to the film's opening-weekend gross, the percentage of the change between the opening weekend and the second weekend is used as a gauge for a film's commercial success. Assuming that the number of theaters stays the same, a normal drop in box office gross from the first weekend to the second would be 40%. A drop of greater than 60% indicates a weak future performance. Chris Anderson, in his 2008 book
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, said twenty years prior, the average film experienced a second weekend drop of less than 30% and that the contemporary drop was now around 50%. Anderson ascribed the change to moviegoers being able to better identify mediocre and bad films through more information, both from more reviews and greater word-of-mouth.
Slate in 2012 also reported a progressively increasing second weekend drop over the course of the last several decades. In the 1980s, the average second weekend drop was 15.7%. The 1990s saw the drop gradually climb to 21.5%, but by 2012 this had escalated all the way up to 49.1%. A lack of venues is usually not a factor as theaters have an obligation to show a film for at least two weeks. The
Los Angeles Times said the second-weekend drop was seasonal in the United States. Between May and July, the country's summer season, films have more significant drops than during the rest of the year. It reported that in May 2014, three opening blockbuster films—
The Amazing Spider-Man 2,
Godzilla, and
X-Men: Days of Future Past—all had drops of over 60% where films earlier in the 21st century rarely had drops that steep. The newspaper cited possible reasons for the drops: that the films did not "inspire long-term moviegoing", and that alternative platforms such as
Redbox,
Netflix, and
video on demand attracted film audiences who missed a film's opening weekend.
The Hollywood Reporter said in 2017, "Generally speaking, a superhero film can fall 60 percent," highlighting
Wonder Womans second-weekend drop of 45% as
scant compared to others in the genre. Specific weekends during the year are known for poor box office and may lead to large drops, such as the first weekend of December following
Thanksgiving when consumers begin shopping, and
Super Bowl weekend. The box office website
Box Office Mojo ranks the following films by biggest second weekend drops during their wide release in the United States, which means screening in at least . The website bases its ranking on box office performance data from 1982 onward. The 2012 family film
The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, though not in wide release, set a record for biggest second-weekend drop. It opened in and grossed $443,901 over the opening weekend. In its second weekend, it screened in and grossed $43,854, which was a 90.1% drop. ==Second-weekend increases and smallest drops ==