An event re-release is built to front-load, because the people who care book the opening night and the rest of the week lives off whoever notices the poster. This one did not behave that way.

Box Office Mojo has posted the first four days of the 40th anniversary run of The Transformers: The Movie, which Fathom Entertainment opened on 17 September across 1,454 theatres. Thursday, Transformers Day itself, took 1,052,609 dollars and finished second in the country for the day. Friday slipped to 844,557. Saturday, the third day, came in at 1,369,312, and Sunday closed on 890,053. Together they make 4,156,531 dollars, of which the Friday to Sunday weekend accounts for 3,103,922 [1].

Saturday beat the day the run opened on

Thursday was the night with the occasion attached to it: Transformers Day, the date Fathom built the event around, and the one every piece of marketing pointed at. A run that front-loads posts its high number there and then works its way down. Saturday went the other way, on the same 1,454 screens, and it went past Thursday rather than merely recovering from the Friday dip. The showtimes had been up for weeks, and a Saturday that size is a room full of people who put it in a diary rather than people who happened to be passing the multiplex.

The 1986 release was an audience that did not come. This one made a booking.

De Laurentiis Entertainment Group put the film into 990 theatres on 8 August 1986 and never went wider than that; Mojo records 990 as the widest release it ever had. It opened at 1,779,559 dollars, fourteenth for the weekend, and finished its domestic run on 5,849,647. Our own film hub has carried those numbers for months, along with what they cost the film: a distributor that did not survive the decade, and a reputation as the picture that soured studios on theatrical cartoons built out of a toy aisle. Forty years on, the same film is playing wider than any release Box Office Mojo has on file for it.

What was attached to the screenings

Peter Cullen died on 27 August. Attached to every one of these showings is Optimus Prime: Awakening, the twelve-minute post-credits chapter Hasbro and Fathom made for the event, in which he plays the part for the last time. Fans have spent the week filming the lobbies, the standees and the tribute card that runs before the feature, and we collected what they shot yesterday. The gross cannot tell you what that tribute card did to a room. It can tell you how many rooms there were.

This is not the final figure

Fathom’s press release described a run from 17 to 21 September, but the ticketing page has been selling well past it. When we went through the dates on the tickets hub the page was rendering fifteen nights, through to 1 October, with a separate 4DX schedule alongside it, and TFW2005 reports that some countries are getting extra days beyond the American window. So 4,156,531 is where the run stands now, not where it finishes, and it has another week and a half to move.

Seeing it again at home

The next chance to watch it at home is the 4K Ultra HD steelbook, dated 17 November. Two discs, a 4K UHD and a Blu-ray, Region A, rated PG. We went through the disc list when the pre-order opened, where disc two carries a line reading “Animated Coda (TBD) (2026)”. Hasbro has named the short and given its running time, but that placeholder is still the only thing in any disc listing we have read that appears to be it.

The audience that did not come in 1986 has spent this week booking seats for the same film. It has not caught that original run’s domestic total yet, and it has a week and a half left to try.

[1] Thursday, 17 September, is posted as a reported figure. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are flagged as estimates on Mojo’s daily table for this release, so the total can shift slightly before the run is certified.

Sources