The official ticket sales for Sunday won’t come in until this afternoon, but The Avengers movie is projected to be the first movie to make $200 million in the U.S. in its opening weekend. Incredibly, that is already more than each of the entire individual theater runs of Thor, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk (it will take another week to catch the Ironman films).
What is most amazing, however, is that this movie is breaking records in a way that bucks the latest trend of movies becoming increasingly front-loaded. Die-hard fans storm the theater at the beginning but then quickly die off as movies compete both directly with online piracy and all the new streaming options and indirectly with all the other forms of entertainment that exist these days.
For example, the last Harry Potter movie shattered the opening midnight record by over 40%, grossing $43.5 million compared to the $30.1 million by Eclipse, the previous Twilight movie. But that midnight was almost half of its opening day haul of $91 million. This was also a record, but only about 25% higher than New Moon‘s old $72.7 million (New Moon still had the record because the front-loaded Eclipse broke its midnight record but failed to beat its total day record). Potter’s opening day was over half of the movie’s weekend haul of $169 million. This was also a record, but less than 7% higher than the previous Dark Knight record of $158.4 million. (Dark Knight still had the record because the front-loaded Eclipse and New Moon both beat Dark Knight’s opening day yet failed to break its opening weekend record.) In the second weekend, the last Harry Potter movie dropped to only $47 million, which was less than the second-last Harry Potter movie which was less than two earlier Harry Potter movies, which were all way behind Dark Knight‘s $75 million second-week haul. (But even Dark Knight had an earlier case of frontloading; despite years of ticket price inflation, Titanic is still king of the eighth weekend.) Movies are increasingly breaking early records but falling far behind in the later ones.
But The Avengers movie was not like any of these recent blockbusters. Its midnight total came in at an eighth-place $18.7 million. This was impressive, but far behind three Potter and three Twilight movies, and even less than the seventh-place $19.7 million scored by the Hunger Games a couple months ago. But by the time the day was over, The Avengers had soared to second place, behind the last Potter movie by just a few million dollars. And by the time the weekend was over, it had rocketed into first place by over 20%! I won’t be surprised if the final tally is even higher than the $200 million estimate (UPDATE: Yep, the numbers came in past $207 million.)
Sometimes the increased speed of word-of-mouth with social media hurts movies, especially if they are bad, as the people who see it first can discourage their friends of seeing it later. But I think word-of-mouth is helping The Avengers movie, as pretty much every critic and friend seems to be agreeing that it’s the best superhero movie ever made in the history of mankind. That’s why, in an age when movies break midnight records but don’t even break the day record, or break the day record but don’t even break the weekend record, in an age where the fall-off is so steep that movies have to beat the midnight record by 40% just to squeeze past the opening weekend record, The Avengers could make less than half of the opening midnight record, barely miss the opening day record, and then shatter the opening weekend record by over $30 million!
The movie industry had shown signs of floundering in recent years, but with the huge successes of Hunger Games and Avengers, and with Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit still to come – among others – it looks like 2012 will be a pretty good year. The industry will continue to struggle with impatient pirates and patient homeowners with surround-sound big-screen living rooms. It will continue to churn out low-risk sequels and remakes and may eventually run out of people who are willing to pay double digit dollars to see superheroes and explosions. But for now, at least, it looks like they will have plenty of money to keep trying to shut down the Internet…