BadAtGender

I saw about one minute of the first. I was at the theater for the Toy Story 1 & 2 3D double feature. During the break between the films, I went to the bathroom and then entered the wrong theater coming back. It took me a minute to realize what I was watching because it was this quiet scene with a psychologist. I thought it was just a weird theater ad at first.

Didn't WDAS start doing 3D films before Pixar? I thought Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons had a limited 3D showing, and I know Bolt did. But Pixar didn't have one until Up.

That's missing the point. It wasn't the loss of the Aurora theater specifically, but rather the general audience trend of avoiding movie theaters (and that movie specifically) for a while. A family hears about a shooting and, maybe, decides to do something else with their Saturday evening. There's really no way of knowing what that effect truly was. We have a lot of comparisons to apply to other films, but there's never been another event like this. It's truly unprecedented. I truly hope that nothing ever like it happens again, so TDKR's box office run can go down in history as an unfortunate, tragically unique event.

Once you start looking at films that grossed less than 350 million, you start seeing sequels that grossed more. The Two Towers is currently the highest grossing film to have a sequel that out-earned it.

I think it's mostly due to the decision to choose Chris Columbus for the first two films. He's not an especially great director, despite past success, and it showed. The second film decreased despite the popularity of the series because HP1 wasn't that good. HP2 was rushed (acknowledged) and was received even worse. This severely hurt the third film, despite being the best in the series. But since audience response to it was strong, you saw the rebound for 4 on out. Later films in the series were probably more impacted by the fact that it's difficult to get new audiences to watch something once you've gotten well into a series.

The best previous box office retention rate for a sequel of a 350 million or better film is Spider-man 2, which retained ~92% of the predecessor gross. So CF is already well ahead of anything else in that regard.

Apparently that was in line with expectations. It's very strange for a feature animation release, because it was so muted, almost like it was deliberately done for the ancillary markets. I'd expect that more of DisneyToons (which had done the previous Pooh movies: Tigger, Piglet, and Heffalump). Still, I'm glad it got made, because it did bring us some really great songs from the Lopezes and may have been the kicker to getting them the job for Frozen.

Disney's 2003 release was Brother Bear, which had a fantastic OW/final multiplier, due to opening on a Saturday, of all days, but grossed far less than Finding Nemo. They had a 2004 release of Home on the Range, vastly disappointing, and Pixar had The Incredibles. Other matchups: Ratatouille vs Meet the Robinsons (2007) Wall-E vs Bolt (2008) Up vs The Princess and the Frog (2009) Toy Story 3 vs Tangled (2010) Cars 2 vs Winnie the Pooh (2011) Brave vs Wreck-It Ralph (2012) As far as RT numbers, both Winnie the Pooh and Wreck-It Ralph garnered a higher tomatoscore than either Cars 2 or Brave.

From Justin to Kelly decreased every day for the first 15 days of its run: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=fromjustintokelly.htm However to get all the drops above 10% is pretty impressive. Take it as a lesson: don't announce your retirement just prior to your film opening.

You can't just look at the cinema box office for this. Disney makes hella money on after market sales (DVD, etc.), and they do so for an extremely long-haul. The films from the Renaissance, Silver Age, Golden Age, etc. all keep making money when they do another release. Additionally, they do a lot of business with tie-in products. It's not that the films are just advertising, but they can afford to splurge a bit on the budgets from time to time because it's going to make it back somehow in the end. Tangled was pricey, but it was a huge success.

Yeah, Tangled was super expensive. IIRC, the production budget's about 260M They did a lot of work figuring out the hair rendering. Plus, it had a very long development process (was originally going to be 2D, etc.) I'd guess that some of the cost was technology development, similar to how Tarzan's ~180M budget was partially for developing the Deep Canvas technology. Frozen was quite a bit lower than Tangled, possibly due to being able to piggy-back on those developments.

If 400M is the 10% chance, Beating CF for the year is the 1%. But who knows. Any projections I've done for it have been useless a week later.