Marvel and Walt Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy exploded out of the gate on Thursday, with $11.2 million, besting the likes of Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($8.7m), Transformers: Age of Extinction ($8.8m), Godzilla ($9.3m), and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($10.2m) to snag the year’s best Thursday debut.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been around long enough that we can make reasonable predictions about the opening weekend take just from the Thursday night box office. Marvel Universe films are relatively consistent in terms of how they play out over their respective opening weekends. When Walt Disney Walt Disney reports that Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, their first non-sequel in three years, earned a solid $11.2 million on its advance-night Thursday showings in 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D, the biggest Thursday debut of 2014, it stands to reason that we’re probably looking at around $112-$140 million for the weekend. Right? Well, this obviously may be the exception to the rule. Because, wow, that is a stunning Thursday number and frankly throws all of my math out the window.
In 2011, Thor debuted with $3.25 million in midnight showings, leading the way to a $65m debut. That means Thor earned about 5% of its opening weekend at midnight. Captain America earned 6% ($4m) of its $65m haul at midnight two months later. That was relatively normal when it came to non-sequels outside of heavily-anticipated teen or geek-centric fare like The Hunger Games (13%) or Pacific Rim (9.6%), especially back when midnight/Thursday sneaks were just starting to become status quo across-the-board. Marvel’s last release, Captain: America: The Winter Soldier scored $10.2m in April but was unexpectedly front-loaded over the weekend, pulling 10.7% of its debut weekend on Thursday and ending the frame with a still dynamite $95m debut.
For reference, Iron Man 2 earned 5.6% of its $128m debut ($7.5m) in 2010 at midnight (just before midnight screenings became a regular event for even general moviegoers), Iron Man 3 earned about 9% of its $175m debut on Thursday, and The Avengers earned about 9% of its $207m figure at Thursday midnight screenings. In terms of out-of-summer debuts, Thor: The Dark World earned $7.1m on Thursday last November, leading to a $85.7m debut weekend, or about 8% of its weekend take before the official start of the weekend. Iron Man 2‘s 5.6% is basically out of the question, although such a figure would give Guardians of the Galaxy a crazy $200 million opening weekend.
With the aforementioned $11.2 million Thursday haul, I would argue that we’re looking at an opening weekend between $75m (15%) and $93m (12%) for the weekend, with reasonable guesstimates falling just a bit over/under the $85 million mark. Now it is possible that Guardians of the Galaxy is not noticeably more significantly front-loaded than a conventional Marvel title, so it’s not quite time to write off some pretty insane debut weekend possibilities. It could pull in 11% of its take last night for a $101m weekend. Heck, the standard 9% gives the James Gunn sci-fi adventure $124 for the weekend, about on par with Man of Steel. It’s not a sequel so there theoretically should be less front-loaded, but it’s a more entrenched-in-Marvel cult property so its appeal to general audiences is still somewhat in question in terms of wekenend legs.
Frankly the Thursday number is so large that I’m not entirely sure what to think at the moment, so I guess we’ll just wait until the Friday numbers roll in. Of note, August blockbusters are still relatively rare and recent blockbusters are even more rare. Point being, we don’t have a ton of midnight/Thursday box office data to compare it to. The biggest August blockbusters were mostly several years ago at best and the midnight/Thursday screening thing wasn’t as much of a mainstream phenomenon back in the days of Signs or Rush Hour 2 and not even in the late 2000′s for The Bourne Ultimatum and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The only relatively recent August blockbuster is Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Obviously we’ll know when we know.
The advance night number is already awesome, even if it’s massively frontloaded. The worst case scenario is that it plays like The Fault in Our Stars (around 17%) and merely gets to $65m. The plausible scenario is a 12% number similar to The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which would give the Marvel adventure a massive $85m debut weekend, easily besting The Bourne Ultimatum‘s $69m record-August debut. The word of mouth is pretty going to be terrific and the reviews are nearly unanimously positive.
Come what may, we’re presumably looking at the biggest August debut ever and presumably the second-biggest non-sequel debut for a Marvel film after the $102m debut of Iron Man. Or the film could be massively frontloaded andIn the meantime, let me open the comments portion to discussion of the movie itself, now that it’s officially in worldwide release. Spoilers are allowed, as long as they are clearly labeled.