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grim22

Star Trek Beyond and Ghostbusters box office: What Went Wrong

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As per our rules for WWW threads, I decided to wait till the 3rd weekend was at least complete for the 2 movies before creating this thread.

 

Star Trek Beyond and Ghostbusters are both big budget franchise movies which were expected to score the big bucks both domestic and OS. Ghostbusters in fact got a wide berth from rival studios as well as no one opened a wide release movie opposite it. Both movies were well received by critics and are "Certified Fresh" on RT as well as getting good audience scores. But in the end, both opened to their tracking (59M and 46M) and just have not had the legs people predicted. 

 

None of Feig and McCarthy's previous collaborations dropped near 50% till weekend 7 where as Ghostbusters now has dropped over 50% on 3 consecutive weekends and is looking at a O/U 125M at best (selling less than half the tickets of Ghostbusters 2) and the OS performance has been downright bomb territory with a 225M finish being the best possible scenario for this franchise relaunch

 

Star Trek Beyond fell more than 58% on 2 consecutive weekends now and looks like it will stall out around 150M or so domestically (a >70M comedown from STID) and is basically looking at China to save it from falling below Star Trek 2009 WW

 

There is actually a genuine chance it might finish below Tarzan WW, not a big chance but who would have thought that would even be a possibility at the start of summer.

 

So what went wrong with the box office performance for these movies? Some thoughts are:

 

1. Awful marketing: Both movies had bad first impressions with their teaser trailers and then didn't course correct fast enough. In Trek's case, Paramount didn't even leverage the 50th anniversary to give the marketing campaign an extra boost and make the movie feel like an event. Both movies were just the "designated big movie for this weekend" rather than being THE big movie of summer

2. Not good enough to expand the audience: While reviews were good for the movies, they just didn't seem to reflect in audience word of mouth which seemed to be more "I guess its good enough"

3. Ghostbusters controversy: They say no publicity is bad publicity but Ghostbusters and the surrounding controversy may have just proven that wrong

 

Any other thoughts? Sound off in this thread

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8 minutes ago, WrathOfHan said:

NOTHING'S WRONG WITH STAR TREK TILL CHINA :sadben: 

 

Unless China downright goes berserk, Beyond won't even come close to ST09 WW. In almost every other market, Beyond opened lower than ST09 as well. The OS performance is pretty horrible to date.

 

 

1 minute ago, Captain Craig said:

Bourne might be added to this list then. Especially if it's third week drop is remotely close to it's second!

 

Already made almost 200M WW and 100M OS and has a lot of markets left to open in. Wouldn't say anything went wrong with it, it is performing about as well as could have been expected.

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Marketing. Ghostbusters' trailers were dreadful (sorry, but they were) and Beyond barely was advertised and they never took advantage of the 50 year anniversary to tie in with the new movie, which seems actually incompetent.

 

Star Trek also followed a not as popular installation, but it was a good movie. 

 

It didn't help that Bourne, playing to the same market came out just one week later and by the time its first weekend was over Star Trek was already losing a ton of theaters to Suicide Squad.  But mostly I think it was the marketing.

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Star Trek Beyond first trailer killed a lot of hype that could come from "Trekkies". 

 

Ghostbusters PR was a real disaster, though. The first trailer was downright horrible ( almost 1 million of dislikes, lol ) and they way that Sony tried to promote this movie, was really awful. 

 

 

Star Trek Beyond can make at least 300 million if it gets a huge China number, but Ghostbusters is already a flop that is performing worse than Fantastic Four overseas. 

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Star Trek's first trailer sucked, and it wasn't until a couple months ago when we actually got decently-edited promos and trailers, but it still looked like something that really only appealed to the Trek fanbase, with nothing new all that added to the table to appeal to newcomers. I can vouch for that, since I didn't care about this movie until I saw the first two Abrams movies on cable a few days before Beyond came out, and my enjoyment of those movies were what compelled me to see Beyond in the first place.

 

Ghostbusters had terrible trailers, and a good part of its marketing was pretty much the cast and the director insulting the original fanbase, aka the people that would most likely see a remake of your movie.

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Just now, Blaze Heatnix said:

Star Trek Beyond first trailer killed a lot of hype that could come from "Trekkies". 

 

Ghostbusters PR was a real disaster, though. The first trailer was downright horrible ( almost 1 million of dislikes, lol ) and they way that Sony tried to promote this movie, was really awful. 

 

 

Star Trek Beyond can make at least 300 million if it gets a huge China number, but Ghostbusters is already a flop that is performing worse than Fantastic Four overseas

 

OMG, that is actually true. WTF???

 

Looked up Pixels from last year and it will actually gross more than Ghostbusters WW

 

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic:  $78,747,585    32.2%
Foreign:  $166,127,224    67.8%

Worldwide:  $244,874,809  
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I still don't get the claims the Ghostbusters cast attacked the fans of the original movie. They attacked the people who attacked the movie just for switching males with females, of course (and those people deserved to be called out for being hateful excuses for humans, of course).

 

Too bad it got overshadowed by the other stuff because it was such a fun movie.

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Ghostbusters had terrible trailers and is not getting good WOM. A comedy that gets good WOM will do well because you can't fake laughs

 

 

 

Star Trek Beyond had terrible marketing, a bad release date (Jason Bourne appeals to the same adult audiences that Star Trek does) and didn't even mention the 50th anniversary in pretty much any of its advertising

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17 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

OMG, that is actually true. WTF???

 

Looked up Pixels from last year and it will actually gross more than Ghostbusters WW

 

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic:  $78,747,585    32.2%
Foreign:  $166,127,224    67.8%

Worldwide:  $244,874,809  

 

 

Yeah, I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at these numbers, lol.

 

While Fantastic Four made 111 milion overseas, I don't see how Ghostbusters might make more than 100 million with overseas grosses still at 62 million. Unless it overperforms where it has to be released, 100 million is out of reach. 

 

People better forget a sequel at this point. It won't happen, unless it's a ghost sequel that only ghosts might be able to watch it. 

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Justin Lin, Simon Pegg, JJ Abrams shouldn't have anything to do with Star Trek (or Star Wars). What happened to it? It simply wasn't a good Star Trek movie, it was barely a good movie at all.

 

Ghostbusters? Morbid curiosity and pity tickets can only sell so far..and they only sell in the US too. LOL. Feig and McCarthy have no business anywhere near Ghostbusters. That's what happened to that movie. It's a flop.  God is indeed merciful as there wont be any part two.

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4 minutes ago, comicbookguy said:

Justin Lin, Simon Pegg, JJ Abrams shouldn't have anything to do with Star Trek (or Star Wars). What happened to it? It simply wasn't a good Star Trek movie, it was barely a good movie at all.

 

Ghostbusters? Morbid curiosity and pity tickets can only sell so far..and they only sell in the US too. LOL. Feig and McCarthy have no business anywhere near Ghostbusters. That's what happened to that movie. It's a flop.  God is indeed merciful as there wont be any part two.

So much bitterness in this post.

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