WATCHMEN scores $4.5M in Thursday midnight previews!
by Steve MasonZack Snyder’s Watchmen, with domestic distribution rights owned by Warner Bros and international distribution rights being handled by Paramount ( oh, and by the way, Fox also has skin in this game thanks to its recent litigation), is off to a blazing start. With well-promoted Thursday midnight and after midnight screenings (1,600 or so), the film adaptation of the classic graphic novel seized an estimated $4.5M.
That is almost double what 2007’s 300 and November’s Quantum of Solace delivered in their Thursday midnight showings. I am being told that, based on that start, my 3-day prediction of $63M is low. That kind of midnight start for a 2 hour, 41 minute movie could equate to a $30M opening day, which could possible translate to an opening weekend in the low $70M’s.
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7 Comments
Quick FYI, the image is reversed. The bloodstain on the face is supposed to resemble a clock hand approaching midnight.
So what is your prediction for the second week % drop? I'll put it at 60%.
In my town the local radio station offered up free tickets to the midnight showing of "Watchman" and passes for another movie of their choice for answering a trivia question. The guy who got it right took the generic tickets, but PASSED on the "Watchman". So the on air guy took the next caller and asked if she wanted them. She wanted the generic pass and passed on the "Watchman". He had to take 4 calls before he found an unthrilled taker who then asked if he would be ineligible to call for a while – like if it counted as a win.
I had never heard that happen before. My town. Trend buckers extraordinaire.
Actually, that's more-or-less what I would expect. Most of the people who want to see this have wanted to for a long time, in some cases literally decades. They are going to all try to see it in the first weekend, which is what is driving this huge preview business Steve is reporting, and we will probably see the huge opening weekend that's predicted. We may also see a pretty good second weekend driven by people wanting to see what all the fuss is about. But I'm still unconvinced that Watchmen will have the broad appeal needed to become a Dark Knight or Iron Man-level hit. And with a budget generally said to be around the $150M mark, and all the huge (and presumably expensive) promotional campaign we've been seeing, a huge opening might not be enough.
I think there is at least a hard-core of fans for this movie, but whether it spreads to general geekdom (I can say that–I'm a geek), or even worse spreads to the general population like some mental Ebola is uncertain.
"Quick! Give me 10 cc's of Spiderman, stat! With the antibodies from his radioactive blood, we can stop this plague!"
Not all comic book movies do well–Catwoman, Incredible Hulk, and Daredevil were Pretty Bad, Astonishingly Bad, and Middling Okay. I was excited for each of them, and disapointed in all. I'm giving a fake gold watch to this movie to avoid actually watching it and hoping it retires soon.
This hardest of the hardcore, is likely to turn out very enthusiastically and so show up in the middle of the night and produce this 'giant' ripple. They've been waiting for this night for twenty years. I hope they enjoy themselves because I can't bring myself to wish harm to such idolization. But does this hyper-enthusiasm transfer to the broader public? Doubtful.
Saw it and found the moral message rather muddy. Do the means justify the ends (as most liberals and Marxists seem to believe) or is the final verdict yet to be written? The movie can't seem to make up it's mind.
I agree. I did not read the novel before seeing the movie today. Many times, it felt like it was formulating some sort of opinion as if it were trying to make a point or convey a message. Then, it would just drop that and go in a different direction. When it was all over, I wasn't sure what to make of it.
Who was right? Who was wrong? Who was good or bad? Frankly, I couldn't tell.
Was the whole thing a big promotion for moral relativism?
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