The biggest opening weekend of all time stands at $208 million for Jurassic World, closely followed by $207 million for The Avengers. The biggest opening weekend in December is the $84 million haul for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, after which they are all $77 million or below. In the 18 years since James Cameron's Titanic, there has not been a single film save James Cameron's Avatar that has surpassed the original 1997 $1.8 billion worldwide cume for the Oscar winning boat sinking romance. The Avengers couldn't do it. Jurassic World couldn't do it. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King couldn't do it. So when I read articles like this one from Deadline swearing that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going to earn $615 million in its global debut weekend and may well earn $300 million on its domestic opening weekend (and others of its ilk), I have to wonder if we are setting the movie up for box office failure. Will it be considered a whiff if it merely performs like a top-tier blockbuster? After all, we've done that before when it came to new Star Wars movies.
Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace was going to make $240 million on its opening weekend. That was the calculation that my father and I had come to in the months leading up to release. It was a mathematical solution to the question of how much could the new Star Wars film gross if it sold out every theater of every showing during its Friday-to-Sunday opening weekend. Yes, this was before Lucasfilm made the last minute choice to open on a Wednesday. Like many box office pundits young and old, we saw the proverbial sky as the limit for how much George Lucas's prequel could gross. Would it dethrone Titanic? Could it break $100 million in a single weekend? Surely it would demolish the $26 million single-day record set by The Lost World: Jurassic Park, right? And there is nothing wrong with pie-in-the-sky box office predictions among fathers and sons, or among fellow film nerds online, at the water cooler, or in school cafeterias. But what was merely playful speculation on our part was all-but-repeated elsewhere as ironclad analysis and foolproof predictions.
Mainstream media outlets reported not just that the film would break records but that basically every single seat would be sold out on May 19th, 1999 until May 23rd, 1999. And thus when it did open, with surprisingly mixed reviews and on a weekend when kids were still in school, it was initially written off as a disappointment for merely doing really well. Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace broke the single day record ($28 million opening on a Wednesday) and became the first film to cross $100 million in five days with a $105m Wed-Sun total. But the Fri-Sun weekend was "only" $64 million, so The Lost World: Jurassic Park's $72 million Fri-Sun record still stood. The film was unquestionably a smash, but yet it was discussed as a disappointment because it wasn't unquestionably the biggest movie ever. The professional pundits hemmed and hawed about why this might have happened. My dad and I joked that the talk of overcrowding may have led to a Yogi Berra effect ("Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore, it's too crowded!").
And that may have been the case, as the film dropped just 25% on its second weekend, racked up another $66m over the Fri-Mon Memorial Day weekend, and crossed the $200 million mark in a then-record 13 days. The film played all summer long, with minimal drops, and eventually earned $431 million domestic, second only to Star Wars and Titanic at the time, but the picture never escaped the notion that it coulda/shoulda done better. As irrelevant as that may be in hindsight, there can be a price when would-be professional pundits (often quoting unnamed box office analysts or unaffiliated financial experts who don't generally study the movie business) start throwing out fantasy baseball box office predictions which are then treated not just as serious analysis but the would-be bar for success. Avengers: Age of Ultron earned $191 million on opening weekend and $1.4 billion worldwide. But there are still those who swear it was supposed to earn $250 million on opening weekend and $2 billion worldwide and consider its performance an example of Marvel's waning popularity and/or superhero fatigue..
The notion that the film is going to open with $300 million in America, in a month where no movie has ever opened with more than $84 million, in an industry where no movie has ever opened with more than $208 million, is so fantastical that it almost resembles an act of industrial sabotage by setting a bar that the film will probably not even approach. Is it realistic to presume that J.J. Abrams's sci-fi sequel will open 44% bigger on opening weekend than any other movie ever, or 3.5x larger than any December weekend ever? If Walt Disney wanted a new opening weekend record, they would have opened the film in the summer, just as 20th Century Fox gave away Phantom Menace's shot at a record by moving to Wednesday in 1999. The reason the pre-Christmas weekend is so good for big movies is the legs you get after opening weekend, not the actual "kids are still in school and/or studying for exams" weekend that leads into the long holiday.
And on that very same weekend King Kong was written off as a failure for "only" opening with $66 million over the Wed-Sun weekend because overeager box office pundits thought the three-hour ape/woman platonic romance adventure would threaten Titanic. Ten years later, the $210 million-budgeted Peter Jackson remake is still considered a failure despite earning $550 million worldwide. This stuff has consequences. Overenthusiastic predictions that The Force Awakens is going to demolish every single short term and long term box office record ever stops being fun chit-chat when it starts coming from would-be serious analysts and being treated as likely gospel. Barring an inexplicable fluke, Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be a massive domestic and worldwide smash that will earn back many times its $200 million production budget. And that December weekend sets it up for long legs here and abroad, especially with a month-long hold on IMAX screens. The only way Walt Disney can really lose with Star Wars, aside from the first movie being terrible and poisoning the well, is for the notion of anything less than record-breaking performances being written off as a failure.
Will a $125 million opening weekend, followed by a $110 million second weekend over Christmas and then another $90 million weekend over New Year's be good enough? Will a worldwide total of "only" $1.3 billion be written off as a catastrophe with damage done to Disney's stock as a result? Star Wars in this current box office environment is something of an unknown. We don't know how the public at-large will react, nor do we know if overseas audiences are as gung-ho for the franchise as Americans allegedly are. Say what you will about Jurassic World, but that one didn't require you to have seen at least three prior films from 30-35 years ago to get maximum enjoyment out of the film. Okay, sure, the film could live up to the hype in every way and break $1 billion in ten days while dethroning Titanic and Avatar by Christmas Day or some other silliness. Preemptively declaring Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the biggest thing ever right out of the gate makes good copy, is fun to write, and gets clicks. We should remember that becoming the biggest everything ever isn't remotely the bare minimum bar for success. I would hope we all learned that lesson sixteen years ago when the Jedi first returned. Because this kind of speculation is, well, "It's a trap!"
