Which movie will have the highest gross at the end of its run?

It depends on when they buy their tickets. If 100 people see a movie on opening weekend for movie A, and 50 people see movie B on the first weekend, 30 people go back to see it on the second weekend, and 20 people go back to see it on the third weekend, then movie A wins, because the faster you earn the money back, the more valuable it is to you. $1000 today is worth more than $500 today, $300 in two weeks, and $200 in three weeks.

That's one more reason to pack in as many people as possible on opening weekend.

 

OF course it's hard to estimate ticket sales based on total gross since kids pay different prices from adults, and the prices are different for differnt showigns during the day.

A move like TPM undoubtedly some more kid tickets than Titanic. HP sold way more than FOTR, I'd imagine - so they have to sell more tickets to reach the same level.

 

I think the future of movies is clear: more kiddie films.

Harry Potter: $950 million
Monsters Inc (passed Shrek!): $468 and counting...on its way to $550 million
Shrek: $455 million
Ice Age: probably another $300-400 million hit.

We're going to see more and more computer-animated films aimed at the pre-teen crowd shooting for that $400 million mark. I'm guessing we'll be getting 4 or 5 of them a year from now on. Plus one Hogwarts adventure every year.

 

maybe one day we will see some special
WORLDWIDE global counting system , so we
will exactly know PRECISE numbers )))

 

Jabba, you're right about the kids films. But the reason for that is simple - there are much more kids and teenagers going to the cinema than adults. Older adults go very rarely indeed. That's why it's so difficult to judge the general popularity of a movie by only looking at box office figures. The box office results only show you what kids like while TV ratings are a better indicator for popularity among adults

 

Tukafo, since you seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, you've probably already read this: Movie Audiences
As far as I know, it's the best information on the web about movie audience composition.

But I'd love to see the same study done for children under the age of 12.

 

for me, this whole cgi kids film crazy is already starting to wear a little thin. i guess it started with toy story, but didnt really take off til a bug's life. reviewrs keep praising them like each one is the end-all of hip, witty, funny, kids movies. i actually didnt think ice age or monsters inc was very funny at all. shrek was pretty good except for eddie murhphy's incessant patented sidekick schtick. a bug life i thought was really good. and antz was good too. but yeah, they're gonna keep churning them out with slapdash scripts like ice age because its an automatic 150 million or more. people will eath them up even if they're not as witty as the really good ones are.

 

I agree completely. Ice Age seemed really marginal to me. Good only in a direct-to-video kind of way. But I have to admit I started off the movie in a bad mood because the AOTC trailer made absolutely no impact whatsoever on the crowd. So much for Star Wars appealing to a new generation of kids...

 

Who can argue with such a definitive study as that Jabba?

 

I thoght Shrek was pretty good - there was a distracting crowd in the theater when I saw it though.

I was really impressed with Monsters Inc. I was mainly there just for the EP 2 trailer, and I thought it was much better than I expected.

 

Heheh. Good one, Ultimate.

 

Ultimate, at last, a little wit from the gushers! I've been waiting 3 years to find out if y'all had a sense of humor.

 

I hope you'll be interested to know about my extensive studies on the matter. My 7 year old cousin won't shut up about it. Definitive market research I'd say.

 

quit while you're ahead ultimate.

i was really excited about monsters inc. cause the preview that's on the toy story dvd is pretty funny. but i found it to be a huge letdown.

 

I put up an opening weekend poll in the AOTC Non-spoiler Forum Here.

I'm also running an Opening Weekend Contest for AOTC Here.

 

TPM. LOTF and Potter are just barely over the 300 mil mark with DVD's coming out soon.

 

Titanic

 

Spidey has definitely raised the bar. I remember some people predicting a $100 million weekend for TPM back in 99, but it took 3 years for a film to reach that.

 

wow, aotc has a real challenge now. if it doesnt make 115 million on opening weekend, its sure gonna lose a lot of prestige. tpm couldnt even muster enough to set the record back in 99 and the hype for aotc is a lot less than for tpm.

there's something weird about movie audiences now though, what is it? last year, almost every big film set some kind of opening weekend record, and then kinda suttered out before reaching "mega"-blockbuster status, like planet of the apes. there seems to be this clamoring among everybody to go to the opening weekend, why is that? i think the trends of the movie going public are changing. and i hope it doesnt mean that hollywood is going to start just clipping the budget of their blockbusters, and instead sink a bunch into the marketing so that they can get their huge weekend relatively safely and get out unscathed with 180 million or so....thus resulting in crap like planet of the apes, and yes, sad to say it, spider man. sorry but i thought the movie was pretty lame. so genre-faithful. standard 3 act superhero flick...1. he discovers his powers 2. he fights small criminals 3. he fights the main super-villian. lots of lame dialog, and utterly groan inducing cliche moments. i want to name some but i dont want to spoil it for anyone.

 

AOTC is not going to do any better than Harry Potter on opening weekend. $90 million tops I'd guess. More likely $75 to $80 million. It will be a huge hit over the long haul however.

 

Spider-man was not a great movie, that's for sure. But it had an 84% rating at rottentomatoes.com. Almost all the top critics in the country, with the exception of Roger Ebert (and he gushed about Phantom Menace, so what does he know? ) liked it. With reviews like that and a record-breaking opening weekend, you have to assume that audiences in general are loving Spider-man. And now it has an incredible amount of momentum going into weekend 2. Sure it may see a 40-50% falloff in the second weekend, but even so that will make it a $250-$300 million hit in the U.S.

AOTC has already lost the opening weekend battle. If anyone thinks that Harry Potter sold fewer tickets opening weekend than Spider-man, permit me to disabuse them of that notion. Harry Potter had a longer running time and a larger percentage of children in the audience (Spider-man's PG-13 rating was well deserved), and therefore fewer showings per day with lower average ticket prices.

AOTC will suffer the same fate. It is significantly longer than Spider-man, and will attract more children. Therefore I put its maximum weekend take at around $90 million. $75-$80 million is most likely.

 

AOTC may not break day one records, but i think it is clear to even the most casual of observers that AOTC will in the end smush the spider. Aside from the tacky love story (which will get the teenage girls in maybe) it looks to be a great movie (and sorry to those who think the love story is not tacky). I can easly see AOTC making 300 mil at the very least, and i cant see spiderman surviving past AOTC's releace date either. Once AOTC comes out, Spiderman will drop like a stone.

 

spider man may have an 84% positive rating, but have you looked at the reviews? hardly any of them are gushing reviews. they're mostly barely positive...stuff like, "it gets the job done" or "its an entertaining popcorn movie"

it looks like we're gonna be stuck with this kind of cheesy cliche superhero film from now on, considering x-men was that way too and it also was a success. man, for once, why cant there be a superhero movie that is actually intense and deadly serious, like unbreakable, but with the spectacle of spider man.

 

I agree that Spider-Man is shallow, derivative, and not all that great. It's carried entirely by the appeal of Tobey Maguire. But expecting more from a comic book film is asking a lot.

People are entertained by that kind of movie. One way to look at Spider-Man is that it's the sequel to Batman everyone's been waiting for. It came close to the appeal of Superman and the original Batman movie.

 

i think superman 2 and 3 are closer to the kind of movie i'd like to see. 2 was really good and pretty serious for the most part. 3 was actually really dark, and kinda scary even if it wasnt the best movie around. they went beyond the light comic fare. spider man lifted everything straight from the comics, even the trademark dumb lines like calling the green goblin "gobby" and "you're the one that's out...out of your mind that is!"...i realize they were trying to give it that comic feel, but i think it was a mistake. the worst part was their charicature depiction of j. jonah jameson.