George Parr

International starts don't happen on a Friday everywhere, in many European countries it is Thursday or even Wednesday. So you are comparing 2-3 days to 2 days, which makes it much more even. Especially when opening day + eventual previews can be pretty big. Then there is also the possibility of the weather influencing things in such a way that Saturday and Sunday are being smaller than expected, putting them on more equal footing with the earlier workdays which may have had more fitting weather. Or much of the respective nation is on summer holiday, in which case the weekends are of lower importance as well.

Yeah, it's definately dropping while HT3 is rising higher and higher. Everything else is increasing as well, here's the new trend: Mamma Mia 2 415k HT3 325k / 570k JW2 70k (-23.5%) The First Purge 70k (-33%) Skyscraper 70k (-26% / -29% with previews) Adrift 50k (-12% / -26%) Sicario 2 72.5k Ocean's 8 35k (-37%)

Second trend is up, quite a bit of movement. I'll leave out the # due to extented previews making things look so confusing: Mamma Mia 2 425k HT3 280k / 525k JW2 65k The First Purge 60k Skyscraper 55k Adrift 45k Sicario 2 67.5k (with previews) Ocean's 8 30k

Monday numbers: #1 The First Purge 105k #2 Skyscraper 95k / 100k (with previews) #3 JW 2 90k #4 Adrift 57.5k / 67.5k (with previews) #5 Ocean's 8 55k #6 Meine teuflisch gute Freundin 30k

That wasn't really the point. The post talked about the preview share. What matters isn't that all movies have previews, but what kind of share the previews had for the opening weekend. The bigger the share for the OW, the bigger of an impact it should have on the second weekend drop. Thing is, "smaller" openings with sizeable previews should see a bigger drop, because their previews were bigger relative to their OW-number than they were for bigger openers. Ant-Man 2 had 11.5m in previews, which is 15.2% of the OW. In comparison, Spider-Man: Homecoming made 15.4m in previews, which is ~13.2% of he OW total. Thor 3 made 11.8% of its OW with the previews, Black Panther 12.5% (which might be deflated due to the holiday weekend), with Infinity War at 15%. 2-3 percentage points difference may not sound like much, but it adds up. Doesn't change that Ant-Man's performance is kind of pedestrian (for a Marvel movie), but the point in general is very much valid, the bigger the share of the previews on the OW, the worse it should be for the second weekend drop (in percent).

Not a whole lot of movement with the third trend: JW2 up again to 115k (+15k from the last one, but still quite a bit below the first one), Meine teuflisch gute Freundin +2,5k, Papst Franziskus -2,5k, nothing else changed.

Ouch, the second trend is pretty ugly, the three movies at the top dropped, JW2 by a ton: #1 The First Purge 135k #2 JW2 100k (-38%) #3 Ocean's 8 75k (-27%) #4 How to party with Mom 35k #5 Meine teuflische gute Freundin 32.5k (+8% / -6% with previews) #6 Love, Simon 32.5k (-22% / -55% with previews) #7 Papst Franziskus 27.5k (-16%) #8 Deadpool 2 25k (-36%) http://insidekino.de/News.htm

First trend is up, again with quite a bit of uncertainty due to weather supposedly improving for the weekend itself (not to mention World Cup games on Friday and Saturday): #1 The First Purge 150k #2 JW2 140k (-14%) #3 Ocean's 8 80k (-22%) #4 Love, Simon 35k (-15% / -51% with previews) #5 Meine teuflische gute Freundin 35k (+15% / flat with previews)

Second trend looks a bit better, for the most part: #1 JW2 125k #2 Ocean's 8 95k #3 Love, Simon 52.5k #4 Deadpool 2 35k #5 Papst Franziskus 25k #6 Solo 25k #7Meine teuflisch gute Freundin 25k

I'd say The Incredibles 2 should also have a decent shot. The first one had 3.5m admissions, and who knows how this one will fare. It does have a pretty good opening-date at the end of September. Would be better if the 3rd of October would be closer to the weekend instead of falling on a Wednesday, but it still should allows for pretty good weekdays. October 1st is also the start of the autumn holiday in 9 states, so that should give a boost as well, even if the states with the biggest populations aren't among them. Doesn't look like anything will beat Inifinity War in terms of money though.

Always the best way to argue, write a text that barely makes sense and then act offended when someone tries to make sense out of it...

Having all movies at basically 4x the Thursday number does seem pretty pessimistic to me. Then again, the weather should be better on the weekend (it was great in many parts of the country on thursday, but it should be great all around on the weekend) and the weekdays already saw some sort of holiday effect due to over a quarter of the country having holidays, so who knows.

Uh, the first trend sure doesn't look pretty, lets hope things pick up a lot... #1 JW2 100k (-59%) #2 Ocean's 8 80k (-50% / -59% with previews) #3 Love, Simon 57.5k #4/5 Papst Franziskus 25k (-44%) #4/5 Deadpool 2 25k (-49%)

How exactly are people bypassing anything? Solo failed because of a general lack of interest, not because the script didn't work. You may have had a point if people went to see it in droves only to give it a horrible rating because nobody liked it, but that isn't the case at all. People weren't invested enough in the movie to go to the opening, and they didn't catch on later either, none of which has anything to do with the script, because people who don't go to see a movie couldn't possibly judge whether something has a good script or not, nor do they make their decision on whether to see the movie or not dependant on how the script is. Not that I really see what you are even trying to say, because you start of criticising others for ignoring that Solo was a bomb (they didn't), only to turn around and effectively say exactly what those you criticised have been saying.

Not sure how your second idea could play out. Wouldn't that basically require all the big stars to have hardly any screentime while the no-names have to carry the movie? If the story were reversed this time around, we wouldn't see The Rock, we would see someone else acting as if he were The Rock. That's doable, but not taking advantage of the actors you have.

Should be interesting too see what has the bigger impact. On the positive side there is no Germany game next weekend, as Germany would play Monday or Tuesday if it advances. In theory that should ease the drop or lead to a slight boost compared to last Saturday. On the negative side, the weather seems to go into summer-mode again, and there still should be some decent World Cup games on the weekend, with the knockout-round starting.

3rd trend sees little change in the numbers. Deadpool 2 and Solo switch places and numbers, JW2 is up slightly: #1 JW2 210k #2 Ocean's 8 175k #3 Deadpool 2 45k #4 Solo 42.5k #5 Papst Franziskus 35k

2nd trend is up, with some improvements: #1 JW2 200k #2 Ocean's 8 175k #3 Solo 45k #4 Deadpool 2 42.5k #5 Papst Franziskus 35k As for Solo over Deadpool, I think Marc_G said something along the lines of Solo running better in the afternoon, while Deadpool works better in the evening. With Saturday evening destroyed by the Germany World Cup game, this would make it tougher for Deadpool compared to Solo. edit: ha, what a timing

Well, big blockbusters rarely open that close to each other in the first place. And numbers that large are more of a recent thing anyway, as there are only six 90m+ second weekends, of which only one came before 2015. 130-140m openers haven't exactly been the norm for a long time either. Older weekends of similar size attendence-wise probably existed before, but in terms of money you obviously won't find any. If you take the much larger ticket prices, 3D, IMAX and all that stuff into account, then you probably could make a case for the Shrek 3 POTC 3 double-punch on Memorial Weekend 2007 fitting this scenario. You can certainly make the case that those two hurt each other, but it also shows that it shouldn't be entirely impossible to have a 130-140m movie and a 90-100m one at the same time.

Um, no, that's in fact very far away from the truth. First of all, this is about truly huge movies, and those don't hold well unless they get boosted by something else. Second of all, what matters is which movie was the really big one. When the "first" is the big one, as happens with the return of a beloved franchise (see TFA or JW), then that movie had an abnormally high gross that went beyond what the franchise normally does. Hence the next one dropping big time, regardless of how well liked the follow up is. I am cherry picking films? Maybe look in a mirror for once, because you are the one doing that. Your examples couldn't fit less. This was specifically about huge movies, not about smaller movies that increase. Yes, there are ways for a franchise to increase if the first one was a sleeper hit that wasn't quite huge yet. But this clearly doesn't apply here, so there goes your stuff like Matrix or the Marvel movies. Marvel is in fact proof of what I said. The smaller ones are irrelevant because they aren't huge, while the Avengers movies did see a significant drop with the second one that was only countered by Asia being much bigger in the meantime (especially China), which was exactly what I stated as one of the ways a huge franchise can keep up its numbers. Looking through the markets, things improved tremendously for Age of Ultron in growing asian markets (especially China and South Korea, which went from 136m to ~320m, with smaller territories chiming in on top of that), and stayed about flat in parts where Marvel was relatively quiet and growing as a franchise before this (e.g. parts of Europe, where The Avengers did relatively weak compared to the market sizes), everywhere else the movie lost a combined 300m from the last one. Transformers is yet another franchise that proves exactly what I was saying. International numbers were good but hardly amazing for the first two movies of the franchise, and even then was Asia offering a surprisingly high percentage of the number for its market share at that time. The third and fourth one then blew up bigtime thangs to 3D and further huge jumps in Asia, even when they were already on the downswing domestically, exactly the things I was talking about. The Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises is another example where the earlier movie wasn't quite as big internationally, thus allowing plenty of room to grow, which in turn makes it anything but a proper comparison for a sequel to a huge movie like Jurassic World. Simply put, you have to look at which movie was the big one, and judge the sequels depending on that, including factoring in price development and exchange rates as well as significant market-developments in the meantime. JW, just like TFA, was already huge from the get go. Any franchise were the first part wasn't comparable to that isn't a valid comparison. Growth can happen when you have a small to mid-sized hit, sequels plummet when coming of a truly gigantic movie, unless very unique circumstances counteract the drop, like China going from middling market to be far away the top international market. This is also quite evident when you look at the fact that The Avengers came out before China truly exploded, while Age of Ultron came out afterwards. While JW came out in the same year as Age of Ultron, thus having little chance to see a giant leap in China with further sequels. Especially when those sequels are not the culmination of the whole franchise, like with Infinity War. You can ignore reality all you want, but that won't change it.

Monday numbers are in, and things look better than expected: #1 Jurassic World 2 325k (-43% / -49% with previews) #2 Deadpool 2 72.5k (-41%) #3 Solo 65k (-51%) #4 Papst Franziskus 45k #5 Hereditary 25k

Which is pretty much just like expected, nothing unusual about it. Both TLJ and JW2 were bound to drop a lot. Maybe they end up 100m below the range that was likely, but they are still generally where you would expect them to be. The ways to improve or at least see a somewhat similar performance in terms of the worldwide gross when following a huge movie are 1) having much better exchange rates or a different sort pf price boost over the last one (POTC 4 would be a good example, which also got a 3D boost) 2) the last movie being only a modest hit in a quickly growing market (e.g. China), allowing for huge growth there to balance losses elsewhere (see Age of Ultron, which also benefitted from a general growth of Marvel in Europe) 3) the culmination of a huge franchise that spend quite a lot of time getting to this point (see Infinity War) Movies like TFA and JW already got a huge boost due to the return of the franchise, which caused nostalgia to drive both to huge heights, which in turn created interest elsewhere. This would automatically cause the next installment to see drastic drops unless exchange rates would be far better. If Infinity War were to be followed up by something like Age of Ultron instead of an installment that continues the Thanos storyline, you'd see huge drops as well.

Sunday trend is up, and it is more in line with what I thought would happen after the Friday numbers listed on the insidekino forum. Though it's obviously anything but clear how much on an impact today will have: #1 Jurassic World 2 290k #2 Deadpool 2 67.5k #3 Solo 60k #4 Papst Franziskus 40k

Just be thankful that - unlike with movies - there aren't people rooting to see a market fail

Mark G said something like the weekly top ten are behind last year by 16% at the same point in time, and with the World Cup coming up this percentage is unlikely to improve. Heading for the worst first half of a year in at least 26 years. Needless to say, 26 years ago was one of the five worst years ever: 5) 1992 105.9m admissions 4) 1986 105.2m 3) 1985 104.2m 2) 1990 102.5m 1) 1989 101.2m compared to the 120 or 130m range of the last few years.