'X-Men: Apocalypse' Makes It A Memorial Day To Forget At Box Office For 'Alice'

As studios shift more of their precious marketing dollars away from traditional marketing methods and towards digital campaigns, social media is taking on ever greater importance – so what clues did online activity give us about the box office potential of this weekend’s wide releases?

X-Men: Apocalypse (20th Century Fox )

4-day Forecast: $82 million

4-day Actual: $80 million

Alice Through The Looking Glass (Disney)

4-day Forecast: $48 million

4-day Actual: $34.1 million

This Memorial Day weekend box office told the tale of two sequels, with X-Men: Apocalypse emerging as the clear winner while Disney’s Alice Through The Looking Glass disappointed. The X-Men franchise has been an almost exclusively good performer for Fox, while Johnny Depp’s stock seems to have been on the wane over the last few years, with the original Alice being one of his last certifiable hits.

Digitally Apocalypse made its biggest splash on Snapchat, where the property became the first advertiser to completely take over the lens store, with a total of nine in all. Each lens transformed users into a different X-Man, from my favorite Cyclops to the evil Magneto. The scale of this activation is put into context by the fact that advertisers usually only have one lens available, among the usual selection provided by Snapchat. As a second platform first, fans viewing Apocalypse video ads were able to “swipe up” and buy tickets directly in the Snapchat interface thanks to an embed with Fandango.

Apocalypse easily won the battle with Alice but did not fare as well as predecessor X-Men: Days of Future Past, which took $110.5 million on the same weekend two years ago. Chatter was not as lively for this installment, with around 200,000 tweets in the seven days prior to release versus almost 700,000 for Days of Future Past. This year we’ve already seen three huge superhero movies debut all looking for that same audience –two bona fide winners in with Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War and a controversial box office hit in the shape of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, so getting the same demo to turn out time and time again can be a challenge. However, this has still been a great weekend for the franchise, landing the 6th best opening of the year so far.

Alice Through The Looking Glass arrived six years after the original and at a time when Johnny Depp has apparently lost his luster and the promise of a 3D treat is no longer enough to lure fans to theaters. Angry Birds took $25 million which won’t have helped Alice’s cause and the fact the Sony title was able to drive twice as many YouTube views before release goes to show that it was able to gain much more traction among that key family audience. Alice performed similarly to Tomorrowland over the weekend, which took $33 million over the 3-day and $42.6 million over the 4-day, although Tomorrowland had scored almost twice the amount of tweets before release with 186,000 – so in this case the similar haul must go down as a win for Alice's brand recognition among the target audience.