Sydney Sweeney may have great jeans, but she isn’t having a great month. Her latest movie, Tony Tost’s neo-Western “Americana,” had the kind of opening weekend at the box office that makes casual observers think something is seriously wrong.
The film made just an estimated $500,000 in its opening weekend via Lionsgate, good for 19th place on the week among domestic releases. With the studio opening the film somewhat wide on over 1,100 screens nationwide (that’s a per-screen average of $436), as well as spending $3 million to acquire it out of SXSW back in 2023, that’s what we in the business generally call “not good.”
But Lionsgate isn’t losing sleep (even if Sweeney is still rethinking the ad campaigns she chooses). In fact, the studio believes “Americana” will turn an easy profit when all is said and done.
We’ve heard the studio spin before: box office opening weekend isn’t what it used to be, and these movies are designed to turn a profit while looking at the long game of putting it on PVOD and licensing it to a streamer. That’s typically the logic we hear when we’re being convinced that audiences don’t have superhero fatigue.
While there wasn’t enough spin in the world to save Lionsgate’s “Borderlands,” Lionsgate is in a different boat compared to other major studios. Despite Sweeney’s star power, “Americana” is not in the same category as one of the studio’s major tentpoles, though it does have another one of those starring Sweeney, “The Housemaid,” coming out this Christmas, so we could be having a different conversation then.
Part of what makes Lionsgate unique to other studios is that, in addition to the two or three franchise movies and a dozen or so other releases, Lionsgate also puts out as many as 30 to 40 small movies per year with limited marketing and a more targeted push under its Lionsgate Premiere Releasing banner. Some of those go direct-to-streaming, like an upcoming Netflix film called “War Machine,” and others open in theaters and on digital day-and-date or after a 17-day theatrical window.
Some of the more successful recent examples are “Sisu” or “Fall,” which each made $7.2 million domestic. There are many more you probably haven’t heard of.
“Americana” fits into that business model, and as IndieWire has learned, as many as 95 percent of those movies do turn a profit after they’ve run their course in theaters, PVOD, and SVOD. In the case of this film, Lionsgate acquired the movie for $3 million, but it also licensed “Americana” internationally, so the studio is only holding the bag for about half of that, or in the ballpark of $1.5 million. The film’s marketing — some of it theatrical trailers, most of it digital, or getting Sweeney to post on her Instagram next to photos of her in head-to-toe denim — tacks on about another $3 million.
Time for some back of the napkin math: The studio expects the movie, from this point, to leg out to about $1.5 million in theaters (don’t forget exhibitors take half of that box office haul), but it also expects to take in a few million from home entertainment sales, Pay-1 licensing to a streamer like Starz (now spun off from Lionsgate) or Netflix, or international windows.
Putting it on as many as 1,100 screens even helps it create awareness down the road. And if a movie like this one day pops on Netflix’s Top 10, it could even get a small financial boost, but it’s unclear what Lionsgate’s deal is in that regard. By the time all that is said and done (whenever that is), “Americana” could be looking at a profit of about $1.5 million, which turns out was more or less by design.
But let’s not confuse “Americana” for being a hit. In an ideal world, “Americana” would have a final box office at least twice of what it’s now expected to reach, and so would the profit. Like “Sisu,” which also opened wider and got a heftier marketing push, the studio believed “Americana” had a little upside to it, what with the Sweeney of it all. And unlike most of their titles that get a 17-day window, “Americana” will be in theaters exclusively for 30 days.
It’s also surely not what the film’s financiers, Bron, had in mind when “Americana” was initially produced for around $9 million. Part of the reason the film has sat on the shelf for two years since it first opened at SXSW in 2023 is because Bron later that year declared bankruptcy. Frankly, it’s fortunate this movie was released at all.
But Lionsgate is pretty good at getting ancillary business from home entertainment and digital releases, tending to over index compared to what other studios can bring in at home. You tend to see action movies and genre movies do especially well after its theatrical run, a big part of the reason why Lionsgate keeps making movies with Jason Statham or Gerard Butler.
But doing this one-for-you/one-for-them model also keeps Lionsgate in good graces with someone like Sweeney when they want to work with her again for “The Housemaid.” And American Eagle controversy be damned, one underwhelming box office opening isn’t going to make Sweeney any less of a bankable star.
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