TServo2049

With all the 90s nostalgia these days, it's fun to see when a BO run is itself a 90s throwback. The big June OW was a staple of my childhood - Batman Returns in '92, JP in '93, Lion King in '94, Batman Forever in '95. It's like how I enjoyed seeing Frozen play like those 90s Thanksgiving family blockbusters that remained the top draw all the way to Christmas and into the new year.

Also in JW,

I swear I saw leaked pictures of an animatronic T-Rex head or something. Was that just built but not used?

Crap, I forgot. OK, it took 11 years from TLW to get another over-$600M grosser, and 20 years from JP1 to get another over-$700M grosser.

Not if you don't count the 3D re-release. It's crazy: In 1993, Universal had the two biggest WW films of all time. Then it took 15 years for them to get another $600M WW grosser (Mamma Mia), another 5 to get a third film over $700M (Furious 6) and a second over $900M (Despicable Me 2), and two more years to get a $1B. And if you count the 3D re-release of JP, it took 22 years for Universal to release a new film that broke its WW gross record.

Oh yeah, how could I forget that? Though again, the OS for that was a bigger surprise than the domestic.

Geez, how many unexpected or underpredicted mega-breakouts is Universal going to have? This will join Furious 7, and let's not forget Despicable Me 2 two years back. Even this early, this certainly looks like it will shape up to be one of the best "surprise" mega-blockbuster overperformances of the 10s so far, along with TA1, DM2, Frozen, THG and GOTG. (And I guess Furious 7, though the OS was a bigger surprise.)

It's been in my head all day yesterday and today, yes.

I swear, I never get these problems at Regal Hacienda Crossings 20. Dublin, California must be well above the national average of well-behaved-ness. (Or maybe I'm just lucky and pick showtimes without screaming kids?)

Box office gross was not really tracked and reported on a regular basis until the early 80s. Before then, the trades reported something called rentals, which is the portion of the gross that the studios got back from the theaters.

Probably in the middle of a data refresh. When they're uploading new data, the site loads a blank page for a while. Maybe they're either fixing those typos, or re-compiling their lists to incorporate the new data.

I forgot about Donnie Darko. Good call.

I am more and more convinced that the San Francisco Bay Area loves sci-fi and that these genre films that underperform nationwide do disproportionately well here. I know I'm using a reference pool of one showing at one theater, but at Regal Hacienda Crossings (who has one of the real full-size IMAX and occasionally makes the top 20 weekend engagements), my opening night 7pm PLF showing of Pacific Rim basically sold out, my opening night IMAX of Interstellar sold out, and my 7pm of Tomorrowland (in the biggest non-IMAX/non-PLF auditorium) was definitely more full than I expected. And it got a little applause too. Of course, it's opening night, and I have no idea how the rest of the showings sold, either on that day or the rest of the weekend (I do know that I bailed out of a 6:30 of Tomorrowland full of kids, because I didn't realize it was in one of the smaller auditoriums). Oddly enough, I heard the theater staff talking about how Poltergeist had nobody in it (and surmising that it would fill up with 13 year olds by the time the movie started). Just interesting.

What's doubly interesting is that a good few of the genre classics of 1982 underperformed in theaters. TRON didn't do very well, ditto for Blade Runner, and The Thing bombed. And counting it as fantasy (not as animation, which I agree is not a genre in itself), The Secret of NIMH also didn't go over well. So 1982 is also a case study in how theatrical duds were now going on to gain a second life on video and/or cable. (And if 1982 was the beginning of this era, I would I would consider its end to be 1999 - the year that gave us Fight Club, Dogma, Office Space, The Iron Giant and Mystery Men. Theatrical failures going on to a second life in non-theatrical hasn't happened to anywhere near as significant a degree in the 21st century; even with the DVD market boom in the first half of the oughts, I can't think of many post-1999 films that flopped theatrically and built their audiences afterward to such a degree as TRON/BR/Thing/NIMH on one end, and Office Space/Fight Club/Iron Giant on the other.)

Sony has two guilty-pleasure horror-action franchises starring Mary Sue protagonists played by actresses who happen to be married to the director/producer of the respective franchises. How often does that kind of thing happen? I'm surprised some crazy Sony executive hasn't suggested a crossover yet. (Or have they? With all the leaked emails, I don't ever remember hearing about anybody discussing a UW/RE crossover...)

Last year or the year before, some other big U.S. movie had bad subtitles in China. Anybody remember what movie it was? EDIT: Just looked up, it was Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney/Marvel needs to find better translators - or does the Chinese film bureau make those decisions? (And apparently the same thing happened to Pacific Rim?)

I honestly thought it would be Age of the Planet of the Apes. (They're probably saving that for Apes 4...)

You guys definitely have a point, this could be shaping up to be a more "boring" big year than we thought going in. That is, we do have breakout surprises, but at least one of the films which were hyped to be the big juggernauts of the year will end up performing below expectations while still being a moneymaking success. Basically, this could turn into something like 2007. That had surprise overperformers (Transformers, 300, I Am Legend, Alvin), but the preordained big blockbusters mostly came in under expectations and just did big business instead of HUGE business. (I can't think of a month which has yielded more overhyped-but-underwhelming franchise sequel blockbusters - in terms of BO, critical reception and WOM - than May 2007. At the time, even though I wasn't following BO, it seemed like the triple-threat of Spidey 3/Shrek 3/Pirates 3 would combine to make it the biggest month in history, and it just didn't happen...) Am I off the mark on this? Anybody else see it?

BOM does lump in undocumented re-releases for a lot of the pre-1982 stuff. Cinema Treasures' anniversary retrospective articles for some films sometimes have first-run grosses - for example, I was able to get Empire's first-run total, excluding the undocumented 1981 reissue. Star Wars' first run was $221.3m. Empire's first run was $181.4m. Those numbers respectively adjust to $806m and $548m. So the drop from first run to first run would actually be $258m. Actually less of a drop than from Menace to Clones or JP to TLW. Cinema Treasures listed Jaws' first run gross as $192m. That adjusts to $761m. The $77.7m first-run total for Jaws 2 listed on BOM adjusts to $270m. So its drop would be $491m. Still absolutely massive. Exorcist and Godfather, not sure. Exorcist II was a dud, so even if the adjusted drop without re-releases isn't $726m, it could well be bigger than Jaws. I just can't find first-run info for anything older than Jaws. (Generally, grosses weren't even reported prior to Jaws, only rentals, i.e. the amount of money paid back to the studio by the theaters.) And if you do count re-releases, each re-release has to be adjusted to its year. That makes it even more difficult. Comparing the pre-Special Edition adjusted figures of Star Wars and Empire, with each release adjusted by its year, gives us $1.14b for SW and $666m for ESB, or a drop of $474m. Adding the SEs gives us $1.384b for SW and $785m for ESB, for a drop of $599m - basically $600m total between the cumulative admissions of the two. I can't find the individual re-release figures for Jaws, so I will just take the $802.9m adjusted figure Cinema Treasures had in 2010, and adjust it to the current 2015 price from the average of 2009-10 (since the article was published in summer 2010) which will bring it to about $847m. BOM's cumulative for Jaws 2, so it adjusts to $292m. That gives it a drop of $565m when all is said and done. Again, can't figure out anything about Exorcist or Godfather. But either way, these were all huge drops, and yet most of them were still big successes and moneymakers (Exorcist II was the only one that was a dud). Jaws 2 fell from its mega blockbuster predecessor to just a big hit (though it was one of those rare occurrences at the time of a movie being a bigger hit OS than it was domestically). But Empire's first-run to first-run admissions drop, by my calculation, comes to 32%. And it wasn't considered a disappointment, because it was a mega hit, and a mega moneymaker (oh, and sequels did not ever increase from the original back then, or even come anywhere close, so there was no such expectation for it to fall short of). I'm rambling, but these stats are fun!

This is a good point. I do wonder if VOD will do well, because people can actually take the time to watch the other movies instead of having to cram them all in before going to see the new one in the theaters. MovieMan is right, if everyone who saw TA1 was deeply invested in seeing the entirety of the MCU, the previous Phase 2 films would have grossed higher than they did. It seems that even the MCU is following common blockbuster film franchise patterns. Either build to a peak, or explode out the gate and then either progressively decrease, or plateau and never reach the peak again even if the subsequent entries increase relative to previous ones. MCU has done both (MCU built to TA1, but TA1 exploded out the gate as relative to the Avengers films itself.)

So you think TA1 was more accessible to casual audiences? It also came off of multiple previous films. I guess because it had an "origin of the team" vibe? I guess it did a better job at laying everything out? I had only seen CA1 before TA1, I had never actually SEEN the previous films. But I was still able to follow everything with TA1. (Though I knew a little about the characters already.) It's interesting to contemplate, if TA2 had just been a standalone movie following off of TA1 and there had been nothing in between, how would it have done? (But at the same time, I can't imagine what such a movie would have been like...) I do know of people who complain about the interconnectedness, who think they should have just tried to make good movies that stand on their own without tying into each other. That Iron Man 2 should have just been a sequel to Iron Man 1 with no Fury or Black Widow or anything else; and so on. This person praised Iron Man 3 for not trying to tie into everything, and for appearing to cap off a 3-film arc for Tony, and actually be a conclusion. (Of course, I bet he'd be pissed off at AOU seeming to undo all that.)

Jawa, you describe my mindset to a T. Even though the best films don't make the most money, I have no emotional investment in this doing well because I didn't come away with anywhere the kind of enjoyment and satisfaction as with TA1, Frozen, or GOTG. (At the same time, I will have to guard myself from heartbreak if a film I enjoy underperforms. I will never let myself get into the kind of near-depression I had after Dragon 2. Never again.)

No movie since TA1, actually. (Though TDKR adjusts, of course.) Adjusting for inflation, the worst "$400M drought" in today's terms would be the nearly 4 years (based on release dates, not milestone dates, since you can't determine those adjusted) between Back to the Future and Batman '89, followed by the 27 months from The Sixth Sense to Harry Potter. Then 2 years from Home Alone to Aladdin, the 2 years from Pirates 2 to TDK, the 22 months from Forrest Gump to Twister, the 21 months from TS3 to THG, and then these 18 months from Frozen to AOU. (All of this is subject to change with further inflation, of course.)

I reacted to it about the same as IM3, a sense of "I was kind of expecting more." The only difference is that I deliberately avoided all advance information about AOU, precisely so I would not feel the bewilderment and disappointment I felt after IM3. (Instead, I just had a hollow "ehhhh....it was good?" feeling.) But at the end of the day, it's just a movie. After the underperformance of HTTYD2 put me into a two-month funk that it took GOTG to snap me out of, I've learned not to let this stuff get me down IRL.

It's a disappointment/letdown in that it's a letdown relative to expectations; even I expected it to at least cross $500M, even though I was always of the belief that it was not going to touch TA1's total. I guess a "That's it? I guess it was OK" film deserves a "That's it? I guess it was OK" gross. It's still going to be the biggest domestic moneymaker in a year and a half. This "$400M drought" has only been matched by the 21 months from TS3->THG, and the two years from Pirates 2->TDK.