By the Numbers: Two of the Weekend's Top Eleven Were Reruns — Here's What Old Movies Actually Earn

1 day ago by Jordan Blake 6 min read

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Cars and Akira took $8.77 million out of theaters over the September 4-6 weekend, nearly 10% of the entire box office, while Lionsgate ran all five Hunger Games films in five nights and reported nothing at all. Let me show you what the re-release math actually looks like -- and why the ticket is really the trailer.

Here is the number that made me open a spreadsheet on a Sunday: $8.77 million. That is what two movies released in 2006 and 1988 took out of American theaters over the September 4–6 weekend — against a total of $88,544,377 across 35 reporting titles. Just under 10% of the weekend's box office went to films that had already finished their theatrical runs before some of the people buying tickets were born.

And that is the part that got reported. The bigger re-release story of the week generated, as far as any public chart is concerned, exactly zero dollars. Let me show you what is actually going on.

Two of the Top Eleven Were Reruns

Here is the September 4–6 weekend, per The Numbers, with the re-releases marked:

# Title Weekend Theaters 1 Spider-Man: Brand New Day $18,000,000 3,520 2 The Odyssey $13,000,000 2,312 3 Coyote vs. Acme $11,338,583 3,727 4 By Any Means $7,415,000 2,903 5 Insidious: Out of the Further $6,515,000 2,897 6 Cars (2006) ←RR $6,100,000 2,900 7 Buddy $5,745,284 1,771 8 PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie $3,300,000 2,613 9 The End of Oak Street $2,910,000 2,202 10 The Dog Stars $2,700,000 3,330 11 Akira (1988) ←RR $2,670,000 787

Cars came back for its 20th anniversary, timed to Lightning McQueen Day on September 5 — the 5th, because he is car number 95. It placed sixth on 2,900 screens and took 6.9% of the weekend by itself. On Friday it was fifth for the day at $2.2 million. Akira, a 38-year-old Japanese animated film, was eighth on Friday at $1.22 million from 787 theaters.

Now divide. Per-screen averages for that weekend:

The Odyssey ...................... $5,624 Spider-Man: Brand New Day ........ $5,114 Akira (1988) ..................... $3,393 ←RR Buddy ............................ $3,244 Coyote vs. Acme .................. $3,042 By Any Means ..................... $2,554 Insidious: Out of the Further .... $2,249 Cars (2006) ...................... $2,103 ←RR

A cyberpunk anime from 1988, playing on 787 screens, posted the third-best per-screen average in the top twelve. It beat every new wide release on the chart except Spider-Man and The Odyssey. That is not nostalgia as a curiosity. That is a title outperforming its slot.

Cars did the opposite thing just as effectively: low per-screen, huge footprint, $6.1 million banked. It also moved its lifetime domestic total from $244,082,982 to $250,182,982 — a twenty-year-old movie added 2.5% to its career gross in three days.

The Week's Biggest Re-Release Reported Nothing

From September 3 through September 7, Lionsgate and Fathom Entertainment ran all five Hunger Games films in theaters, one per night, in order: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay – Part 1, Mockingjay – Part 2, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Each night carried a different theatrical-exclusive sneak peek at The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which opens November 20.

I went looking for what it grossed. It is not on the Friday chart, not on Saturday, not on Sunday, not in the weekend top 35. Fathom event runs frequently report late or never, and I am not going to invent a number to fill the hole. So here is the honest version: the grosses are unreported, and that absence is itself informative. Nobody scheduled this expecting a chart position.

Because look at what the run is actually for. Five nights, five different pieces of Sunrise on the Reaping footage, five separate reasons to buy a ticket to something you already own. The ticket is the trailer. The audience paid to be marketed to, in a room, with no skip button — and the studio booked revenue instead of spending it. The Numbers lists Sunrise on the Reaping with a reported production budget of $185 million. Against that, a week of theatrical trailer distribution that at worst breaks even is free money.

Why These Five Titles

This is where our own database gets interesting. Here are the Trakt ratings we hold for the five films that played:

The Hunger Games (2012) .................. 7.22 23,160 votes Catching Fire (2013) ..................... 7.43 18,318 votes Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) ............... 6.82 16,635 votes Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015) ............... 6.90 13,248 votes Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) ...... 6.86 12,387 votes ──── ────── average 7.05 83,748 votes

Now put the domestic grosses next to them:

The Hunger Games (2012) .......... $408,010,692 ████████████████ Catching Fire (2013) ............. $424,668,047 █████████████████ Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) ....... $337,135,885 █████████████ Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015) ....... $281,723,902 ███████████ Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes ..... $166,350,594 ██████

Five films, $1.62 billion domestic. And the shape is brutal: after Catching Fire peaked, every subsequent film made less than the one before it. Ballad did 41% of the original's domestic gross — a 61% drop from the franchise peak.

Here is the part that matters. Over that same span the ratings barely moved. The spread from best (7.43) to worst (6.82) is 0.61 points on a ten-point scale, and the arc is not even monotonic — Mockingjay – Part 2 rates higher than Part 1. The audience did not decide these movies got bad. Ratings held roughly flat while domestic revenue fell 61%.

That is a distribution problem, not a quality problem. And you do not fix a distribution problem with a trailer on YouTube. You fix it by putting the films back in the room and finding out who still shows up.

The Same Play, At Marvel Scale

On September 25, Avengers: Endgame returns in IMAX and a premium format Marvel is calling Infinity Vision, carrying an exclusive look at Avengers: Doomsday (December 18). Identical mechanic, bigger engine.

And note which titles get chosen for this. In our database, Endgame sits at 8.37 from 40,656 votes and Akira at 8.12 from 11,124 — the two highest-rated films in this entire re-release cohort, well clear of the Hunger Games average of 7.05. Studios are not re-releasing whatever is lying around. They are re-releasing the titles with the highest stored goodwill and a product downstream to sell.

Fathom's own 2026 Big Screen Classics slate — twelve titles including Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Ocean's Eleven, The Silence of the Lambs and The Fifth Element — is the version of this with no sequel attached. Fathom CEO Ray Nutt calls classic re-releases "an important theatrical programming category." The chart above suggests he is not being polite about it.

The Conclusion the Numbers Support

The tempting read is "the pipeline is empty." The data does not support that. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is sitting at $917.8 million domestic. The Odyssey is at $584.8 million and posted the best per-screen average on the board. New releases took four of the top five slots this weekend. The originals are working.

So this is not desperation. It is arithmetic. A re-release costs a studio close to nothing — the film exists, the marketing is the anniversary, the print is a file — and it does three things at once: it books revenue, it delivers a trailer to a captive paying audience, and it rebuilds the habit for a franchise whose last entry lost 61% of its domestic gross.

Back in June I argued that an aging logo no longer guarantees a floor for a new film. This is the mirror image of that finding, and it is not a contradiction. Old IP has stopped reliably selling new movies. It turns out it can still sell the old ones just fine — at nearly 10% of a weekend, with a 38-year-old anime outgrossing new wide releases per screen.

Not a thin pipeline. Marketing that books revenue instead of costing it. The studios found a line item that runs in reverse, and they are going to run it until it stops working.