X-Men: First Class numbers was just added to the long range forecast dated April 9, 2011 for the summer movie season over at Boxoffice.com . The site is predicting an opening weekend of $70M and a gross of $155M. I'm assuming these figures are for the North American market (i.e. Canada and U.S. only and excludes Mexico).
Also of note is that Thor was added to their long-range forecast dated March 12, 2011. Updated tracking numbers for that film, according to the site, suggests an opening and cumulative gross of $73M and $208M, respectively. Note that the earlier table listed Thor's projected opening weekend figure at $77M — 5% higher than the newer April 9 figure. It was at $77M up until the March 19 forecast and was downgraded to the $73M figure starting on the March 26 Forecast table, holding steady at that value through to their April 2 update. Whether these numbers are actual prediction changes or merely human error in copying numbers is not known. It's hard to imagine forecast numbers actually going down just as marketing is ramped-up as the release approaches.
Are these numbers reliable? That depends on your analysis.
On the March 12 table, Boxoffice.com projected a $22M opening weekend for Sucker Punch, and downgraded it to $19M on their March 19 report, 6 days before official release. Box Office Mojo lists Sucker Punch as having grossed $19M in its 3-day opening frame. This downgrade may be due to the bad reviews the film garnered right before release. It appears that in this case Boxoffice.com was spot on in its forecast.
Still, I wager that most CBM fans would think these opening and cumulative figures for both X-Men and Thor are a bit on the low side. I would expect XM:FC to have lower 3-day opening box-office than any of X2:X-Men United ($86M), X-Men: The Last Stand (103M), and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (85M) primarily for two reasons. First, it is a prequel with none of the returning cast members and only really retains 3 of the mainstay characters from the previous non-Origin ensemble movies that audiences are familiar with. Second, the Wolverine movie left such a bad taste in audiences' mouths that a lot of the would-be viewers are probably not going to want to see this installment on opening weekend lest they get burned yet again, electing instead to wait it out. The only saving grace for First Class so far is its mostly well-received domestic and international trailers that seem to give a fresh take on Marvel's merry mutants. So $70M may be a reasonable prediction.
The predicated cumulative total for XM:FC is also lower than even the actual cume for the first X-Men, which at $157M, is the lowest-grossing of the X-Men franchise to date. However, the first installment which was released in 2000 actually has an adjusted gross of $233M in terms of 2011 dollars, given an estimated ticket price inflation of almost 50%—from $5.39 in 2000 to $8.01 in 2011. In terms of estimated ticket sales therefore, it is actually the Wolverine installment that has sold the least amount of tickets, which means that Boxoffice.com is predicting that XM:FC will sell even less tickets than that 2009 installment of the X-Men franchise.
On the Thor front, there is good reason to believe that opening figures there may be under-estimated. History has shown that a movie like Thor tends to do better than predicted. Exhibits A and B are Spider-Man and Iron Man. Both were non-sequel Marvel movies that kicked-off the summer movie season, with the latter being the closer analogue since it was a film produced exclusively by Marvel Studios—just like Thor—and had probably just as much name recognition (or lack thereof) back then among general audiences as Thor does now. Spider-Man was slated to open in the $60M to $70M range but—as most everyone knows—opened to an unprecedented, ground-breaking $114M and proceeded to shatter every opening record in the books at the time. Similarly, Iron Man was forecasted to open in the $75M to $85M range, with distributor Paramount projecting a $65M to $70M debut, but instead it opened to a whopping $102M.
Boxoffice.com's predicted $208M cume for Thor is well below both Iron Man's predicted $260M (by EW.com) and actual $318M total. The disparity between EW's Iron Man prediction and the actual cume—at 21%--is glaring. It's Dark Knight prediction of $255M fared even worse being off by 109% from its $533M actual. Although, nobody could have really predicted that TDK's boxoffice numbers would be able to reach such stratospheric heights that far ahead of its release.
In this era of online ticket pre-sales and widespread online social networking, it is theoretically easier to gauge public anticipation of films ahead of time. Tracking figures and projections should solidify in the days before the films' openings as movie ticket e-tailers such as Fandango submit pre-sales figures, and as the twitterverse and facebook starts getting abuzz in anticipation. Are such predictors better today than their forebears in years past? Well, we'll know in a few weeks. That could be just around the corner to some, and eternity to others. So which movie will own the summer? Your guess is as good as mine. Get ready to place your bets.
ComicBookMovie.com, and/or the user who contributed this post, may earn commissions or revenue through clicks or purchases made through any third-party links contained within the content above.