Originally published June 28, 2015. Updated November 29, 2022.
This week in The Callow Way, Neil Calloway looks at projected box office takings…
I saw the headline and was momentarily confused “Marvel’s Ant-Man tracking $55-$60 million domestic opening weekend”. “Hold on,” I thought, “The movie hasn’t been released yet.” Then I realised it referred to its predicted, rather than actual opening box office. As Flickering Myth reported, that would make it one of Marvel’s lowest grossing films, down at the bottom of the list with The Incredible Hulk from 2008 and some way behind the next lowest grossing films from the Marvel stable, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, who both had a $65 million dollar opening weekend in 2011.
As FM pointed out, while box office is still king, US domestic box office is becoming an increasingly smaller factor in whether a film is a success, however, I did wonder whether tracking predictions of a movie’s opening weekend may have an effect on the actual figure; if a film is predicted to have a low opening weekend, would people be discouraged from seeing it in the same way a negative review or lukewarm word of mouth might put people off?
It’s worth looking at other films to see if their predicted box office has been the same as their actual opening weekend gross. Tracking showed that Jurassic World would earn between $100-$150 million in the US in its opening weekend. In fact it earned more than double that, pulling in $208 million during its first few days.
Fifty Shades of Grey was predicted to have an opening weekend worth $60 million. In actual fact it pulled in $85 million. Furious 7 had an opening weekend of $150 million dollars, more than $30 million more than its predicted box office.
The only film released this year that I could find that made less than it was predicted to was Insurgent, the second film in the Divergent series, which made $5 million less in its opening weekend than the $57 million it was predicted to make.
So, are the companies that predict box office numbers just getting things wrong, or is there something else at play? Anyone who followed the recent General Election in the UK will know, predictions can be wrong, but consistently underestimating the gross of major films? It seems unlikely.
I would argue that it is more likely that studios are deliberately underestimating opening weekends, so they can say their films have done better than predicted. It also helps insulate them if the film actually does badly; a lower predicted opening means they can say “hey, we didn’t expect it to do much anyway”, when their film, featuring a huge actor and based on a much-loved TV show bombs at the box office, or when the film based on a classic science fiction story, directed by the guy behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E, with the lead played by the breakout star from a critically acclaimed TV show fails.
Box office predictions are unreliable, and I’m wary of the way they are used. Don’t believe anyone who says a film is going to be a success until people have actually paid to see it. Anything else is just marketing.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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