ST The Last Jedi Box Office Discussion (see warning on page 307 before posting)

We don`t know the full picture of what Disney/Lucasfilm has mapped out yet. To restart the franchise with the focus on the big 3 and and the original trilogy was a correct decision. But my bets are on that Rey is not Skywalker related, and therefore its easier for them to move away from the Skywalker family / saga thing, post sequel trilogy.

 

I agree which is also why I always argued that if they were going to move away from the Skywalker-themed Episodes then Episode VII should have taken place hundreds of years later. But they needed the legendary characters to restart the franchise quickly so our feel good ending in ROTJ had to be sacrificed.

Justice League is dropping their trailer this weekend. Guess they learned their lesson when Dawn of Justice first trailer got completely run over by TFA celebration trailer.

 

I don't see that at all. It was 3D that made it such a huge hit. Avatar made 3D acceptable again, it was the only true 3D-movie we ever really had. It basically offered something new that no movie had ever done. That was the huge appeal, not the story, which was structured well enough to work but hardly something people would have come out in droves for. Avatar with a weaker story would still have been a success, Avatar without 3D wouldn't have been anything special. There is a reason why Avatar isn't really a much talked about movie, nor deeply ingrained in the culture, it simply isn't very memorable when it comes to the content. That doesn't mean that the story was bad, but that it isn't really something that in itself captured the imagination of everyone. The one thing people remember this movie for, is 3D.

3D and the huge price connected to it was also the reason why it did so well worldwide. Its admission totals were very good to great, but only in few places really out of this world. Titanic trounced it almost everywhere. When your tickets costs up to 50% more than the most expensive blockbusters, and you combine that with excellent exchange rates and something that hasn't really been done before, you end up with huge numbers. It also helps when you start to set records. Usually people take notice when something like that happens and want to see it as well, hence movies sometimes seeing unexpected success which leads to it sweeping through the worlds' markets. Deadpool is such an example.

That doesn't mean that the sequels somehow won't be a huge success. Part 2 is still a Cameron-movie, and it will be the first real 3D-movie since Avatar itself. Most blockbusters tend to add a bit of 3D here and there to grab some more money through it, hence the 3D-shares going down, because it isn't really something you need for the most part. But Avatar 2 should be different. A proper 3D-movie should not have trouble with any possible 3D-fatigue, as it actually has to offer something.

 

Avatar had insane repeat business and you don't get that if people only care for 3D and not for characters and story. Why Alice and Wonderland, which undoubtedly benefited from 3D craze, didn't make 2.7 billion but just 1 billion?

 

Avatar was not bad and the romance was better done than in 99% of the movies. I hated the romance in Titanic, but it was well done in Avatar.

 

$11.5 million Wednesday for BatB. Pretty big tumble after a very big jump.

 

Avatar was a great movie experience. In many ways it's still the best 3D movie I ever seen visually speaking. It is the only 3D movie I ever seen where the 3D didn't seem like a cheap carnvial trick where stuff was being thrown into my face for the sake of it. The 3D truly felt seamless, even more then TFA. Combined that with a "new platform" (3D has been around since the fifties but nobody ever used it like that) and a intriguing plot that as some romance/plenty of action and you get a cultural phenomeon. But once it left the theater, Avatar as mostly been a forgotten film. It's major warts as a film never allowed it to stay strong in video/TV and therefore it's really lost a lot of the zip it had. Can it regain it? Possibly but I don't think it will ever be what it could been. 10 years (possibly longer) between the first and second film is acting a lot but especially when you consider what has happen since. Since 2009, Marvel has risen to be an absolute juggernaut and of course, Star Wars has come back with a vegenance. Those three things combined with it doesn't appear like Cameron as a true game changer under his sleeve and it seems like it will be very remote Avatar 2 will make that big of a dent in the universe. Again it's going to make crazy money but I really think TFA can rest easy that it won't be touch for top box office domestically. For that matter, Avatar 1 and Titanic should rest easy. I really see only Jurassic World MAYBE being changed by Avatar 2. Maybe. And even that is a reach.

jedijax

Yes but not anything too drastic. Tuesday is the discount today which families really love to take advantage of. Expect to see a even bigger drop before a massive pickup this weekend. And again I expect big numbers next week with a lot of schools out for Spring Break. The trick again though will it keep going once Spring Break ends. That will let us know if we are looking at Civil War or Rogue One and beyond numbers.

 

Gravity and Pi used their 3D pretty damn well.
I figure James​ Cameron does not release merely good movies. He makes them slowly and he makes something special. When Avatar 2 finally turns up, it will be worth buying several tickets.

Star Wars isnt made that way. Make a quality movie, but get it out on a tight timetable for a hard date. That works too.

 

I looked at the top ten box office of all time. Star Wars is at number 10. This year, it will leave the Top 10 for the first time after forty years.

 

I would tend to think Avatar had fad-like appeal rather than the kind of lasting appeal that a franchise like SW has. We will certainly find out.

I found it to be pretty forgettable.

 

Huh? How do you figure? I saw Avatar 3 times in theaters, even I think the story is mundane and unoriginal. The characters were even worse than the story. None of that mattered, though, because for me, seeing the movie in 3D was an EXPERIENCE. It was unlike anything I had seen before in theaters. It was akin to 1977 when that Star Destroyer graced the screens and audiences gasped in awe. I wasn't there, but that's how I felt seeing Avatar in 3D. It was like I could reach out and touch the screen. Sure, now, I've seen tons of 3D movies, it's not as novel, but Avatar remains one of the best looking 3D movies ever made (I actually think TFA -- even though it's a conversion -- is one of the better 3D movies as I won't watch it in anything but 3D ever again). I also loved the adventure of it, I liked watching the flying scenes, I liked watching the action, and I loved the music. The production values and everything associated with the craft were an A+. The weakest bit was the dialogue, which was borderline terrible (it was also terrible in Titanic; Cameron cannot write dialogue when it's sentimental, he just goes full on cheese), and the characters were next, with a couple of villains so two dimensional that they may as well have been actual cardboard cutouts. To call those memorable characters is a joke. There was no motivation except for pure corporate greed on the one hand (Ribisi), and then the other, just a military general who wants to kill everything. You didn't get any sense they were REAL people, complicated people.

A good example is thinking that Hitler was just this Satanic incarnation of evil who actually thought to himself each morning, "How can I be evil today? I am just evil. And I love it." That's not how he thought of himself, he was the savior of Germany, he was destined for greatness, he was destined to restore the luster of the German Empire and establish a Reich that would last a thousand years. He BELIEVED in what he was doing. That's what makes him such an interesting character. If you just take away all of that and script a villain as purely evil with no redeeming qualities, nothing else going on, what you're left with is a story made for kids. Not a sophisticated adult story. It's bad storytelling, bottom line. The plot was the strongest of the weak elements -- not original, but I found well paced and at least moves along nicely. It's not weak, but it's not strong either. It works perfectly well in context of all of the fantastic visuals.

To say that nobody would see it multiple times if it didn't have great characters is just not accurate. I loved all 3 of my theatrical viewings and I saw it another 3-4 times on Blu-ray since then. I can still enjoy the heck out of the movie as pure visual eye candy and a lot of fun, but that doesn't mean it's a flawless masterpiece that deserves to be emulated in storytelling craft.

I didn't understand the comment from above, so I'm not sure what was intended. We don't have 4K in theaters? Huh? Movies have been 4K in theaters forever now. You said "Ultra 4K," which doesn't make sense. There is no "Ultra" 4K. It's like being pregnant, you're either pregnant, or you're not. 4K refers to the lines of resolution (roughly 4,000). Home 4K is just starting to become a "thing" recently, late last year, and there are very few titles available still. I own maybe 15 4K movies, which is pretty good given how few there are. Most people won't be able to tell the difference because: A) Their eyesight isn't good enough, B) Their TV is too small (should be 65-75"), and / or C) They sit too far away. If you want to experience 4K at home and be able to tell the difference, at least you need 20/20 vision if not better (mine is 20/12, so I can sit further away and see more detail), you need to be within 6-7 feet of a large TV, and your TV needs to be, well, large. I've seen studies saying that if you're sitting 10 feet away from a 50" TV you're just not going to be able to tell the difference most likely. I sit about 7 feet from my 75" TV and it's a big difference.

In the future, you could see projection standards increase now that 4K has come home, so you could see the rise of 6K projectors or 8K projectors. The main problem there is that film scans at 4K, and there are arguments that film can scan at 8K and realize the advantages, but I am skeptical. Most of those arguments come from big die hard old school "film fans." I think 4K already looks better than a film print, personally, so I don't think film would scan any higher than 4K resolution. There are RED cameras on the market like the Dragon that shoot in 8K but you're not going to see anything mastered in 8K for ages. First, the actual image resolution out of an 8K camera is going to be more like 7K; with the RED Scarlet I have it's technically 4K sensor size, but the final captured solution is closer to 3.2K, so it's ideal for mastering in 1080p and having some space left over. That's what gave rise to the 6K camera options (I think Arri's Alexa is 6K or better), because you can master to 4K and still have a bit of space left over on each side of the image for cropping. When filmmakers shoot in 8K, it's often a time-saving device as well. You can shoot a medium shot and literally use the shot for both mediums and close-ups, just by cropping the image to a close-up and that cropped resolution is still 4K or better. You can also turn a wide shot into a two-shot or a full shot into a medium or something like that. It's convenient for filmmaking and saves time and money on set, although big budget shoots care less about that sorta thing (they'll re-light for every setup most likely; only indie shoots like mine run short of time and get saved in editing by the camera lol).

There's also the problem that at this point, if you ever did have 8K projection, you'll never be able to see a bunch of the movies from the past 15 years in any sort of higher resolution at home or in the theater, because they were shot in 1080p (AOTC and ROTS) or 4K (most modern movies up until maybe a year or so ago). You'd probably be able to tell the difference with an 8K projection on such large theater screens, I would imagine. It would be pretty awesome, but I'm not sure most audiences would notice too much.

 

So Beauty is at $217 million as of business yesterday so depending what it did on it's Thursday totals (have not seen them yet), B&tB could be at $300 million at the end of business day Sunday or extremely close to it. And with another week of Spring Breaks going on, expect it to do big business next week as well. $400 million seems to be a lock now, can it get to $500 million? Will have to see how it does once these spring breaks end. Other news seems like Power Rangers is tracking for a $40 million opening weekend which is pretty solid expect I think it's going to get wash away pretty quickly and again Lionsgate should be having their accounts start cooking the books now on it. Also Logan could hit $200 million domestically by the end of the weekend. I could see a $250/650 million split for Logan which would make one of the highest grossing X-Men movies ever.

I really enjoy the talk about Avatar 2 but honestly? Until production actually starts I feel like it's wasted breath sometimes.

 

That's not the same in any way, shape or form. Alice in Wonderland had a few 3D scenes. As I said, that's part of why there has been a bit of 3D fatigue, hardly any movie does really bother with 3D. They add some scenes here and some scenes there to grab additional money, but it's always just a conversion of normal scenes, nothing that was specifically shot in 3D. Unlike Avatar, which was shot entirely in 3D.

Beyond that:
- I didn't say that people didn't care about the characters or the story of Avatar
- there is a huge difference between a true 3D movie and a movie that has some rather irrelevant 3D effects for a few seconds
- Avatar was the first, the one that introduced something new. That's what sets the mark. Everyone that follows cannot possible capture the same magic of the one who delivered it first. Doing the same thing doesn't bring something new to the people, and in this particular instance, no movie even did the same thing, because no one bothered to make a true 3D-movie

I think it will be easily past 300m by Sunday. Something around a 90m weekend should be doable, if everything works perfectly maybe even 100m. This is a family movie, those are huge on the weekend. 320m by Sunday sound possible to me. Oddly enough, the next week will likely put it behind Rogue One by 15-25m before it might catch up a bit over the 3rd weekend.Tough to say where it will head from there. High 400s should be the very least it manages, 500m sounds pretty good at this point, catching Rogue One isn't completely out of the question either, though it would need great legs for that.

 

Oissan

Agreed. Equating a movie like Alice in Wonderland 3D effects to Avatar is not fair. Alice in Wonderland was kind of the cherry on top to make some extra coinage. Cameron made Avatar to be a complete game changer and as you say it was filmed entirely in 3D, not just a few scenes.

I think the big indicator for Beauty will be what it does after these Spring Break does. I see the make or break moment being Easter weekend. If it can hold strong through that weekend and beyond, then we could be looking at passing Rogue One domestically. If not it's more somewhere between Civil War and Finding Dory most likely.

 

I'm a homer with Star Wars, that should be established by now, so I'm rooting against Beauty and the Beast every day. To me the box office is like sports, so it goes without saying I'm rooting for the home team. It's nothing personal, Beauty and the Beast was enjoyable, I would recommend it to others, I contributed $40 to its OW box office, so obviously I'm not some crazy hardcore about it. I just would very much like to see it make a nice $450M and stop there, not threaten Rogue One which just ascended to its position and I'd like it to stay there until Last Jedi knocks it off (quickly). Plus, there's a difference between rooting against a movie and just rooting for it to achieve a good solid level of success but not TOO much

I would say if Beauty is $90M or below this weekend, any hope of beating Rogue One is probably gone. If it hits $100M, it's definitely still on the table needless to say. So we'll see, predictions are ranging all over from $76M to $110M that I've seen.

 

Power Rangers had a $3.6 Thursday night preview so $40 million is doable for the weekend but again I still think it's going to crash and burn quickly just like Kong has.

 

WB is really trying to sell the Justice League trailer tomorrow. It looks more of the same from Dawn of Justice though I am really starting to to like Gal Gadot the more I see her as WW. Nobody will ever top Lynda Carter but she really is pulling off the look too. And I don't feel guilty about liking Gal since she is over 30 and a MILF.

 

But isn't Beauty competing against TLJ for the top box office of the year?

 

BatB is on the same league as R1.

TLJ is on the same league of the top 5 WW.

 

Sounds like 23.8m for BatB on Friday. That should probably lead to high 80s or low 90s for the weekend, unless the Saturday really explodes.

At this point I would say that it will be quite a bit behind Rogue One come next Friday (~25m or so), while being ~20m ahead of Finding Dory, so pretty much right between the two. Funny enough, the difference between Rogue One and Finding Dory didn't change much until the end. They were 45m apart after day 14 and about 45m apart at the end of the run. 500m sounds like a good target for BatB at this stage, though it obviously depends on how good its legs will be.

Unless a miracle happens it shouldn't be a threat to TLJ, at least not domestically, haven't really checked worldwide numbers so far.

 

Well that threat dissipated quickly. I think people are about to get another quick dose of just how tough it is to make $500 million, which Beauty and the Beast won't. Not an impressive Friday increase by any means compared to Jungle Book and some other Disney live action films, and a weekend in the low $80s now predicted. Even if that rises to as high as $87 million on a great Saturday and strong Sunday, I don't think any of that will matter. Rogue One made so much money mid-week after its 2nd weekend that it'll leave Beauty and the Beast in the dust and never look back. Rogue One's 3rd weekend was almost $50 million, which is something Beauty and the Beast won't match on its third weekend. It'll probably come in around $40M or so, still excellent, and it'll probably come close to matching Rogue One's 4th weekend ($22M) because that was the first non-holiday period weekend for Rogue One.

Also, Beauty and the Beast in my mind was the only true competition to The Last Jedi, simply because it's a bit tougher to predict. I had it for a $135M to $155M OW and it went well ahead of that, which didn't surprise me TOO much to be honest, but it did surprise me. I realize that other people want to talk about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as another big movie of the year, and it definitely is, but I don't see it bucking the trend of Marvel movies opening huge and falling like a rock immediately. Guardians 2 should open huge, but I don't know how big. Early estimates are $160M, that's the apparent industry tracking, but it's not even really "on" tracking until a few weeks before opening so it doesn't mean much. I think they're perpetually wrong on every tracking estimate for the most part, they low ball them all. Rogue One was the closest, which actually tells you how muted the Rogue One opening was in some respects, but what Rogue One lacked in OW firepower it made up for in incredible mid-week grosses for two weeks in a row and a stellar 3rd weekend. If Guardians is tracking for $160M, I think it could hit $185M.

The biggest problem -- and why I don't take the movie seriously as a threat to come even close to TLJ -- with a film like Guardians 2 is simply that anyone who is 50+ pretty much won't care about the movie. People I know who did go to see TFA and Rogue One, because they're Star Wars, just weren't ever comic book people and to them Guardians is just weird. The female audience is always tougher to capture with a movie like Guardians as well (and to varying degrees can be with even Star Wars, let's be honest), and the female audience is vastly, vastly underestimated much of the time. I feel like it's only recently that Hollywood has begun to understand that a cute little romantic comedy doesn't actually harness the full power of the female audience. They must have thought a decade or more ago, "Well we release some cute romantic comedy, it makes $17 million. We release Spider-Man, it makes $100 million. We have to cater to teenage boys and young men!" Uhh, no, you were just releasing the wrong content. You put something out (ugh) like 50 Shades or like Twilight (ugh again) or The Hunger Games (yay, yay, meh, blah - my reviews of those 4 movies lol) or Beauty and the Beast and you get MASSIVE openings. It's a powerful demographic, I'm told that females make up more than 50% (!) of the people on this planet, who would have known?!

Guardians is that kind of movie that every single person who calls themselves a movie buff will be seeing in theaters. I mean, nobody is going around saying, I'm a huge movie fan, I love movies, I go to the theater all of the time, but I'm skipping Guardians. No, it's not going to happen. So that taps into a fairly large group of people like me who are the primary force for box office openings. After all, there are something like 1.3 to 1.4 billion admissions per year. That's only about 4 tickets per person, but I account for at least 50 tickets per year if not even as high as 100. It's the big movie buffs who if you catch them all, you can always open a movie over $100M, which is really only about 8-10 million people opening weekend because of premium ticket prices. Maybe not even, maybe even 7.5 million people. Once all of those big movie fans go, though, you have a precipitous drop after opening weekend that Marvel has been unable to avoid on almost any of their films. I think it's because Marvel movies (and TV shows) are just incredibly fun, and people like me will go see every one of them, I love Marvel. I'm not a "fan" in any true sense of the word, but I like every single Marvel Studios movie so far, I have watched every single show (except the last few episodes of Iron Fist), and I own every Marvel Studios movie on Blu-ray as well. If you're not into that universe, though, you don't even care about the films in general, let alone a sequel to a movie you maybe didn't even see (it was great, by the way; see it lol).

The Last Jedi's OW should be fairly predictable, we have so many data points, and the most important of those is $155M and $248M. Barring some Rylo logic, it's obviously opening above Rogue One, and below TFA, and if Beauty just opened to $175M I think it's fair to say that it's opening above that, too. I would say the minimum OW is $185M and the maximum is $215M. I think there's actually a solid chance it could be the 2nd biggest OW of all time behind only TFA, but it'll be still a good ways behind TFA. The other thing is the mid-week numbers won't come close to TFA's first week, they'll be closer to Rogue One, but the second week numbers will be closer to TFAs as they will rise just like Rogue One did because of the calendar. Calendar lines up pretty nicely, Sundays will take a hit with X-Mas Eve and NYE, but Sunday is nothing to write home about anyway, and it extends the holidays (once again) by annexing Monday as a holiday for two pseudo four-day weekends in a row, both of which will be monster. It'll clear $600M before the holidays are over, after its third weekend (including Monday the 1st). May look something like $215M first weekend, $85-90M second weekend (massive drop because of Sunday X-Mas eve, previews taken out, etc.), and $65-70M third weekend. Add in the actual holiday to each weekend, more like $130M second weekend (four day) and $90M third weekend (four day). The weekends alone are $435M in that case plus 9 strong weekdays averaging $22.5M per day is $202.5M for a total after January 1st of $637.5M. Split the difference between the $90M that Rogue One made after the holidays and the $200M TFA made and you have let's say another $140M left in the tank for a final domestic total of $777.5M, #2 all time.

You heard it here first. That's my optimistic prediction in March My more muted, just take a $185M opening and extrapolate for a final of $669M.

EDIT: Rth's 23.8M Friday number is significantly better than Deadline's 21.2M, so I guess we'll see. I always trust Rth over Deadline, though, so that's a better Friday for Beauty. Not great, but good.

 

I think the big question is whether BatB will beat Finding Dory. Not so sure about R1, but I think that the BatB/FD showdown will be interesting. Then we can get into GOTG2. Right now I can't see GOTG2 topping what BatB is heading for.

 

I don't understand why is BatB compared to RO? Different release time altogether and therefore different rules. BatB won't have holiday legs that helped RO.

Likewise, Dory was released in summer when schools are out. March has different rules. BatB is really in competition with THG rather than summer and holiday movies.

Also, nobody ever thought that a movie other than TLJ would win 2017. BatB, GOTG, Fate of the Furious, Homecoming, Wonder Woman, etc are in competition for #5 - #2. TLJ could lose overseas like TFA did to Furious 7, but domestic and worldwide wins are locked.

 

BatB is compared to Rogue One because Rogue One is one of only two 500m grossers. Since Finding Dory made 486m and BatB is running ahead of that one right now, it is only logical to compare it to a movie that made more than 500m, to see whether it has a chance to get there as well. It doesn't matter at all when a movie started, as this isn't about a daily comparison but the final result.

 

Regardless if Beauty can make a run at $500 million, it's still a big haul for a second weekend as it might not even drop 50%. It's certainly sticking a pretty big number out there early that quite frankly no other studio other then Disney can catch. For example, the Justice League trailer just dropped. Quite frankly it look more of the same. Looks like something made (other then the CGI) in 1997, not 2017. It does look like it's going to have a bit more humor then Dawn of Justice but other then that it looks like more of the bloated pizzaburger that was Dawn of Justice. Simmons looked cool as Gordon I must say and everyone else look the part while Gal looks better and better as WW everytime I see her. But really do I think it can make a run at even Beauty and the Beast numbers? No not unless something drastic happens. And if Justice League cannot make a run at Disney's top guns this year, who can??