The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread

[BadOlCatSylvester]

2 minutes ago, THUNDER BIRD said:

Unfortunately it seems Transformers without Bayformers is not enticing audience. 

 

They need to go to someone who can bring that scale, destruction & spectacle.

 

Audience have perceived certain kind of movies when it comes to transformers and last few movies haven't fit that perception.

I think they should just let the franchise rest on film for the foreseeable future. Because at this point, it's fucked either way. The Bay era crashed and burned as people just grew sick and tired of it by the end, and the attempts they've made to revitalize the brand since then have all been nonstarters, with One increasingly looking like the latest in a long line of those. Bumblebee was their last chance to make it shine, but unfortunately they squandered that potential with the muddy mess that was Rise of the Beasts, so here we are. Bringing Bay back would most certainly make things worse, yet the franchise never truly recovered since then. They're trapped. And while I suggested a hiatus, Indy 5 last year proved even that's not a guaranteed solution. Let's wait and see what David Ellison and the Skydance team does when they get their Paramount seats, I suppose.

[lorddemaxus]

5 hours ago, WebSurfer said:

Same setup as I back in the day.

 

Unfortunately, I recall our classes never seeing any good movies from our field trips. Movies I can remember are Happy Feet 2 and Mars needs Moms...

I don’t want to derail the thread but this is my only chance to mention this. I remember asking my teacher to put on Scott Pilgrim in 7th grade (which she did because I was the class movie nerd) and everyone hated it. I forgot there was a sex scene in the movie and well, we had to watch a different movie when that popped up. We ended up watching Ice Age 3 instead, which of course everyone loved. Laughs and joy abound instead of the reactions of disgust Scott Pilgrim got. One of the worst experiences in middle school.

[Boxofficerules]

2 hours ago, Krissykins said:

My favourite school trip memory was going to see Spice World 

 

 

 

and I’d much rather watch that than a cartoon tbh (it was a huge deal here) 

Spice World?!?!? That school should have been investigated for child endangerment!

[ThomasNicole]

38 minutes ago, THUNDER BIRD said:

Unfortunately it seems Transformers without Bayformers is not enticing audience. 

 

They need to go to someone who can bring that scale, destruction & spectacle.

 

Audience have perceived certain kind of movies when it comes to transformers and last few movies haven't fit that perception.

Maybe Bayformers is the problem tho. 
 

The freefall on box office started with him in TF5 which had horrible results everywhere except China. 
 

The semi-reboot followed the same cards that Bay left and was also semi-succesful at best.
 

Beyond the obvious factor of animated sometimes limiting appeal, maybe TFOne is just paying the price of Bay era.

[Mad Max007]

They should have made Bumblebee 2. The first has 90% RT score, highest of the franchise. It was a huge fumble on their part to not follow it up.

Edited yesterday at 09:37 AM by Mad Max007

[vafrow]

On 9/18/2024 at 6:10 AM, vafrow said:

 

Joker: Folie a Deux, T-16, Western GTA (southern Ontario), Thursday Previews and Monday EA 

 

Total Sales: 83

New Sales since T-19: 12

Growth: 17%

Theatres: 5

Showtimes: 19

Tickets per Showtime: 3.7

Chains tracked: MTC4

Ticket Premium in effect: Y

 

Sales by Showtime

Late Afternoon: 6/4

Early Evening: 50/9

Late Evening: 27/6

 

Preview Sales by Format

Dolby: 32/7

VIP: 25/6

IMAX: 26/6

 

Comps

1.258x Beetlejuice² for $12.3M

0.223x Dune 2 for $2.2M

0.264x The Marvels for $1.7M

1.078x Alien Romulus for $7.0M

Average: $5.8M

 

Monday EA Sales

Total:116

New sales: 29

Growth: 33%

Showings: 2 IMAX showing in radius 

 

EA Comp

0.286x Dune 2 for $0.6M

 

This has maintained a steady pace all week, on the higher end of my expectations. More comps will come online later this week, so I thought better to get an update out now for like to like comparisons, but it has increased against comps.

 

Joker: Folie a Deux, T-14, Western GTA (southern Ontario), Thursday Previews and Monday EA 

 

Total Sales: 101

New Sales since T-16: 18

Growth: 22%

Theatres: 5

Showtimes: 19

Tickets per Showtime: 5.3

Chains tracked: MTC4

Ticket Premium in effect: Y

 

Sales by Showtime

Late Afternoon: 6/4

Early Evening: 65/9

Late Evening: 30/6

 

Preview Sales by Format

Dolby: 36/7

VIP: 36/6

IMAX: 29/6

 

Comps

1.365x Beetlejuice² for $13.4M

0.894x GxK for $8.9M

0.242x Dune 2 for $2.4M

1.329x BB:RoD for $7.6M

0.297x The Marvels for $2.0M

1.031x Alien Romulus for $6.7M

Average: $6.8M

 

Monday EA Sales

Total:131

New sales: 15

Growth: 13%

Showings: 2 IMAX showing in radius 

 

EA Comp

0.310x Dune 2 for $0.6M

 

Growth rate continues to be solid. It settled around 5% a day earlier in the week, but moving up to 10% already.

 

I'll probably need to cull the comps at a certain point. I still have Aquaman comjg online in a few days which I'll want.

[Eric Prime]

https://thequorum.com/weekly-unaided-awareness-chart-a-minecraft-movie-makes-a-splash-six-months-before-release/

 

[THUNDER BIRD]

3 hours ago, THUNDER BIRD said:

Unfortunately it seems Transformers without Bayformers is not enticing audience. 

 

They need to go to someone who can bring that scale, destruction & spectacle.

 

Audience have perceived certain kind of movies when it comes to transformers and last few movies haven't fit that perception.

Transformers One - Bay could never.

[THUNDER BIRD]

I'm not saying to give it to Bay.

 

But someone who can make a better movie and mix it with the larger scale & Mayhem of Bay.

 

Time for one approach is over I think, if this franchise needs to take off again then it needs to find that mix.

[justnumbers]

25 minutes ago, Eric Prime said:

https://thequorum.com/weekly-unaided-awareness-chart-a-minecraft-movie-makes-a-splash-six-months-before-release/

 

Yo Wicked going crazy. If good, I think this is something that can open to 80M

[CheeseWizard]

20 minutes ago, THUNDER BIRD said:

I'm not saying to give it to Bay.

 

But someone who can make a better movie and mix it with the larger scale & Mayhem of Bay.

 

Time for one approach is over I think, if this franchise needs to take off again then it needs to find that mix.

IMO whoever they give it too just needs to be given more creative control. Knight and Cooley had it and their movies turned out good, but afaik Steven Caple Jr was basically just a puppet director, hired because he wouldn’t push back on the producers dumbass demands like making Wheeljack look like Urkel, hiring a YouTuber to play Arcee, pinching Jazz’s alt mode and giving it to Mirage etc. 

 

Honestly the live action stuff just needs a director who isn’t a pushover and a writer who can write. 

Edited yesterday at 12:08 PM by CheeseWizard

[Eric Prime]

Moderation

 

Not the Transformers thread. Come on guys, you know this isn't the place to talk about the state of the franchise.

[AniNate]

We don't even have any hard numbers in yet it should be noted. At least wait for that before the post mortems.

[Unfitclock]

@charlie Jatinder you have any numbers?

[vafrow]

38 minutes ago, AniNate said:

We don't even have any hard numbers in yet it should be noted. At least wait for that before the post mortems.

 

I'd also add that with all of the early shows, plus being an older skewing kids movie, we also don't have a great handle on interpreting the preview number to extrapolate the weekend. We've trended towards bigger weekend internal multipliers this year.

 

I don't think we'll get a strong handle on how this is doing until we start getting a sense of Saturday numbers.

[CheeseWizard]

53 minutes ago, Eric Prime said:

Moderation

 

Not the Transformers thread. Come on guys, you know this isn't the place to talk about the state of the franchise.

Aye, fair enough. Though what does the boxofficepro tweet you linked say? Those always glitch out for me

[CheeseWizard]

Is this worth a read? Someone on Reddit did their own tracking for TFOne and it looks far, far worse than any of the predictions over here 

 

[M37]

11 hours ago, AniNate said:

 

Which are? I mean yes the possible school group thing but even that doesn't fully explain things like its evening Thursday preview sales at Disney Springs basically matching TFOne's in total until today 

 

Even KFP4 is a relatively modest example of a strong internal multiplier. Don't think there's any reason to believe TWR would be worse tbh. Movies like Bad Guys and Abominable had even better internal mults.

I would just say that because of the nature of the source material (best-selling book —> school reading lists), and the tone of the film (much more “wholesome” family or even plain adult entertainment rather than disposable, joke filled “kid fun”), I expect it to behave in terms of sales patterns more akin to a live-action PG family film than a franchisee animation (KFP4) or even IP animation (Garfield). 

And because when looking at family-friendly films in general, the denominators are small and so resulting multipliers are large, those kind of factors which can drive early sales, but are not are reflective of future GA/walk-up demand, can have a disparate impact on the extrapolation. A sales pattern that ends at 1,000 tickets sold looks very different if at some point A it had presold 70 (14x), 100 (10x) or 140 (7x) tickets. And some of the nuances of the sales to this point (PLF dominance, for example) suggest to me Wild Robot is going to lean towards the lower multiplier range.

 

Do I think Wild Robot is going to outgross TF1? Yeah, probably (that’s how I would be inclined to bet)

But do I think it will have a higher OW? Probably not, and given where some prognosticators have set the bar, that would be seen as “disappointing” 

 

tl:dr - my working analog is not a recent animated film but rather 2017’s Wonder, and while I expect Wild Robot to be more walk-up/ less school group reliant, still think that is a better starting baseline than something like KFP4

[AniNate]

Didn't see indications of very good walkups yesterday but sales today definitely looking a lot better now. 6:45PM XD screening at Canton has a lot more sales than the Wednesday fan event

[AniNate]

  

2 minutes ago, M37 said:

 

 

tl:dr - my working analog is not a recent animated film but rather 2017’s Wonder, and while I expect Wild Robot to be more walk-up/ less school group reliant, still think that is a better starting baseline than something like KFP4

 

Well, Wonder didn't have Thursday previews, so can't make any kind of internal multiplier comparisons based on that. However IF which released in mid-May also had a better internal multiplier than KFP4, even with much weaker reviews.