Animal Farm presales are slowing 5 weeks out, looking like a mid 7 figure OW. Despite a strong first few days, Farm presale pace is below other midsized Angel films (has been slightly below Sketch (~$4M quasi_OW) and above Solo Mio ($7M)). Total Presales on par w/ Last Rodeo ($5.5M OW).

TOTAL Presales to date are ~75% of Homestead (6M OW which is slightly deflated due to Christmas being on opening week), 94% of Last Rodeo (though Rodeo's well outselling it in daily sales as the graph shows above), 10% of David [down from ~20% on day 2 of presales], 79% of King of Kings (whose presales exploded after cinemacon – so perhaps expect Angel to try something there again this year), 157% of Solo Mio (probably the best comp given both films likely will draw a more general audience crowd due to "IP" attached).

FWIW Homestead pacing is probably around King of Kings at this point but I lack enough datapoints to fairly throw it in the rolling average.

Animal Farm's big advantage is simply that faith based films are inherently presale heavy relative to all films (lower marketing spends that are targeting a narrower audience) which, I suspect is why films like Solo Mio and The Senior (low budget inspirational football film) overperformed relative to Angel reported presales –

Also, note that at ~35 days out, you're only going to have captured ~10% to 15% of all pre-release presales (though the Senior only had ~7% of presales captured and breakout hit King of Kings only had 2% of presales banked to-date due to explosive growth). So while very early presales have some usefulness there's only describing a small portion of final sales.

If you look at the graph I think you can also see how I've been talking around a pretty steep falloff in presales over the past week. Weekly sales are roughly on par with Solo Mio but if this trend continues, I think a genuinely bad opening weekend result starts to look on the table. Despite the memes/mockery generated alongside the film's initial trailer, early presales clearly signposted that a ~$10M OW was on the table which would somewhat vindicate Angel's odd pickup of the film as a bet on animation. It's far from a perfect fit for the distributor but if presales trend downwards more and it falls below a number of "normal" Angel releases, I think this clearly reads as a missed opportunity.

Animal Farm was initially set at Netflix before being stuck in limbo for a few years prior to Angel's pick up. It's clearly a film with a troubled perceived value; however, it's still has a very clean elevator pitch ("famous book adaptation w/ major hollywood voice actors"). It's a sneakily hard film to baseline given that its getting a real theatrical release (presumably 5-10M marketing budget, near 2k screens) but still a more limited one than studios and the core audience isn't obviously the distributor's core audience.