This weekend should be providing a lesson to the multiple box office predictiing news sources out there, offline and on, but chances are it’s not. The lesson I’m talking about? Relying on internet hype to predict a movie’s outcome.
Case in point: Watchmen. Sources all over the web were making it out to be the Citizen Kane of comic book movies. It would raise the bar or blow everyone out of the water or however you want to put it. It was supposed to be the end all/be all of movies as far as geeks were concerned.
What happened? Well, yes, Watchmen was number one last weekend. But it did not meet expectations. Original estimates called for $70mil, then down to $60mil. True, it made $55mil, but almost $5mil of that were from Thursday midnight screenings, a cheat that’s sadly growing in popularity among comic book movies, along with (the more expensive) IMAX screenings.
$55mil is still great for a comic book movie’s opening weekend. People started predicting that overall, Watchmen could make maybe $160-180mil domestic gross. Now, after seeing the estimates for its second weekend ($18mil), it seems less likely.
So what happened? The Internet happened. Hype got to such epic proportions online that media sources figured Watchmen was a guaranteed hit. But they forgot one crucial thing - online hype is usually driven by GEEKS, who are Watchmen’s target demo to begin with!
When I’d ask my personal friends and relatives about Watchmen, most didn’t have a clue what Watchmen was. Some thought it was sci-fi, others thought it was fantasy. Only a handful knew it was based on a comic, though neither had ever heard of it until now.
My point is, don’t rely only on the Internet to gauge a movie’s success. There are dozens of small movies that are heavily pushed by some of the movie websites out there that no one’s ever heard of (except other movie buffs). At the end of the day, good ol’ fashioned word of mouth still provides a better gauge of how well a movie will do.