The Box Office Buzz and Tracking Thread (December 2021 - July 2023)

[Mulder]

1 minute ago, SpiderByte said:

Wait, so Ant-Man was worse for the genre than Shazam...because Ant-Man was more liked and more people saw it? How?

You're just being purposefully obtuse here dude. The Last Jedi opened to over 200 million, BvS opened to over 150 million. A lot of people see stuff opening weekend because they're interested in the concept, not because they pre-emptively like the movie.

[Eric Prime]

Moderation

 

@SpiderByte If you continue this any further, you are going to leave me with no choice but to threadban you. You starting a fight against others for daring to be negative on a Marvel movie, derailing threads in the process, isn't funny and super old.

 

This applies to everybody else here as well.

[grim22]

1 hour ago, Eric Williams said:

I am very, very curious to see how Spider-Verse and Flash perform in a couple months. If those also do poorly (not impossible!), then we might have to consider Ant-Man 3 the Heaven's Gate of the superhero industrial complex. And I don't think that film will get any reevaluations after the fact.

 

If the CBMs this year all underperform, the studios should take the opportunity with the writers strike coming up as well to take a break in 2024. DC is pretty much already doing that, Marvel can also use the time to refocus. Come back in 2025 in a big way.

[DisposedData]

8 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Wait, so Ant-Man was worse for the genre than Shazam...because Ant-Man was more liked and more people saw it? How?

Ant Man came before Shazam so yes.

[SpiderByte]

4 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

If the CBMs this year all underperform, the studios should take the opportunity with the writers strike coming up as well to take a break in 2024. DC is pretty much already doing that, Marvel can also use the time to refocus. Come back in 2025 in a big way.

The strike is pretty unlikely to happen. And even then both Marvel and DC have stuff ready through 2024 and theres zero chance a strike lasts that long even in the very unlikely event it does happen.

[Krissykins]

Quantumania was more liked than Shazam 2? Where? 
 

Anyway, not looking good for Guardians, but there’s still time. I guess. 

Maybe summer actually kicks off with Book Club 2: The Next Chapter. 

[misterpepp]

One of my go-to guys for sale dates has gone overseas on vacation, so I'm afraid I might be slower on getting those for the next couple weeks or so. I'll keep an eye out, but I might miss Mermaid's date. Apologies in advance if that ends up being the case.

[TheFlatLannister]

Trying to create a web scraping script because manually counting on Atom takes way too long and I would like to update more frequently 😅

[AMC Theaters Enjoyer]

Nvm

Edited April 23, 2023 by AMC Theaters Enjoyer

[DC Rich]

8 hours ago, M37 said:

Sure do hope the early review embargo release and now these free screenings do help push a good number of people off the fence, because the numbers not only are looking bleak, with an unweighted average around $14.5M for Thursday, but trending down

 

 

Looking a little closer at pace, and its honestly even worse (credit to @keysersoze123 for banging the drum on this). The growth over the last week has been only slightly better than MoM, despite having just a third of the volume, and on par with AMWQ without the bigger initial fan rush. Continuing to trek in that range would project to 120-125K tickets sold for Alpha by T-7, and a finish in the ~250-260K range, or at or below $14M for Thursday. There's a very real possibility the OW here not only misses $100M, but begins with an 8 (and in the pessimistic case, maybe even a 7!)

 

As someone who has been - and still is to a degree - a little more optimistic about the potential of a more casual/GA audience here producing a stronger late kick (in terms of growth rate) than the more anticipated titles that came before, the data is the data, and the even more subtle trends one would want to see just aren't materializing. Can't escape feeling that we may be staring down another slow-motion crash, similar to not only AMWQ but perhaps even Shazam, where Fury of the Gods saw a 44% decline from the prior film's OW, in large part because of external factors, audiences just having moved on. That same reduction would be ~$82.5M OW for GOTG3, and that that outcome is entirely plausible with present numbers and trajectory.

OW Range: $80-105M

 

On a related noted, the potential is brewing for Disney to have a disaster of a year, as all of their major releases have some questions, and would not be shocking if every one missed the mark and came in well below early expectations

 

[YM!]

4 minutes ago, Firepower said:

This is crazy. I wouldn't be surprised to see Feige getting the boot next year if it does this poorly and since The Marvels wouldn't do any better.

Now this is just crazy talk and doomposting. Yes, the theoretical low for Guardians is horrendously bad but they’re not getting rid of Disney’s golden goose. It’s likely they’ll continue the steps of course correcting they are already like reducing output or more of a focus on quality.

[Firepower]

21 minutes ago, YM! said:

Now this is just crazy talk and doomposting. Yes, the theoretical low for Guardians is horrendously bad but they’re not getting rid of Disney’s golden goose. It’s likely they’ll continue the steps of course correcting they are already like reducing output or more of a focus on quality.

Guardians doing 80-100 mln is crazy talk and doomposting, but here we are. While yes, it's way too early, but not impossible. They already started executions after Ant-Man flop weeks ago and they'll continue it with each fail until it can finally reach the head of the dragon.

[vafrow]

Mods, feel free to delete if this is off topic for this thread. Posting because I think it feeds into the discussion here and expectations out of stuff coming down the pipe.

 

I was looking into some numbers around superhero sequels, and how often a superhero film sequel makes more than it's immediate predecessor.

 

Outside of the MCU, I only count 10 instances.

 

Only one Superman movie (If you count BvS). Two Batman movies (Batman Forever and The Dark Knight).

 

Three X-Men films surprisingly (X2, X3, and Days of Future Past) plus one Wolverine film (Logan).

 

And three real random ones (Blade 2, Hellboy 2, Venom 2).

 

The MCU has had 13. Only two that didn't for the longest time were Iron Man 2 and Age of Ultron. Now it's been two in a row with Wakanda Forever and Quantumania, and soon to be three.

 

A lot of that is how franchises have changed and expectations out of sequels to be bigger. But I think it speaks to rare it was for things to keep increasing.

 

We've seen it recently with Star Wars, which peaked with The Force Awakens. Jurassic World never repeated the 2015 success.

 

We might just need to stop expecting big increases with second entries. Hope to recreate the magic of the first might be the goal. 

[Dragoncaine]

1 hour ago, SpiderByte said:

The strike is pretty unlikely to happen.

The strike is quite likely to happen.

[SpiderByte]

23 minutes ago, Dragoncaine said:

The strike is quite likely to happen.

I don't see why this strike is any more likely than any other potential strike in the past near two decades since the last one

[GOGODanca]

2 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

I don't see why this strike is any more likely than any other potential strike in the past near two decades since the last one

You mean the strike that last 100 days back in 2008?

[cooldude97]

@M37 vieweranon talked about your post twitter and now the marvel subreddits are claiming doom posting lol

[vafrow]

8 minutes ago, cooldude97 said:

@M37 vieweranon talked about your post twitter and now the marvel subreddits are claiming doom posting lol

I saw it on twitter earlier today as well.

 

I get a sense that this thread is making the rounds.

 

 

[elcaballero]

The marketing I've seen for Elemental just makes it look really blase. Hoping it picks up.

[filmlover]

52 minutes ago, elcaballero said:

The marketing I've seen for Elemental just makes it look really blase. Hoping it picks up.

I think it's going to end up with an identical total to the director's previous movie (2015's The Good Dinosaur, $123M). Pixar will see megabucks again, but it won't be with this.