The casual hype just never seemed particularly strong to me, hence the sub 450 predictions. I was pushing 1b for TFA back in March of last year, so it's certainly not like the pre-sales or my opinion of the film are what caused my predictions.
I have to admit, I am extremely happy it won't be reaching the 170m+ heights a few posters who know who they are were being so condescending about being "locked" this past week.
What followed was phenomenal because of the opening. Unless you can find me another 150m+ opener that has ever hit 3.4x. Only one other 115m+ opener has ever hit that mark, and it was animated.
TFA would have been very lucky to hit 3x had the WOM been average. The multi we saw was 1000% due to astronomically good WOM unseen since probably Avatar.
Opening to half of what that would be for R1, and not having bad WOM despite what some here might want you to believe. Not saying I know this will have bad WOM, I'm saying even with good WOM 3.4x would be a very hard multi to hit off of an OW like that.
That's very premature. A 70m OD would indicated around a 150m OW. No way we can then assume a 3.4x multi as being a lock off of an OW that high, even if it does in fact have good WOM.