NOTE: The first half of this article may be boring unless you’re interested in the figures. But if you’re not, jump straight to the second half where I give my thoughts on the Transformers 2 insanely addictive marketing campaign. And yes, you were probably a victim, as I was. And it lead to my own demise.
Even after watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I cannot resist posting a story about the movie. But this is a big story. What is it, you say? It’s the story of Michael Bay’s super massive summer blockbuster really following through with that notion of being a “blockbuster” and at the same time busting the US box office.
WARNING: A lot of numbers are coming at you.
Cutting all the crap, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen grossed an obscene $201.2 million at the US box office in its first five days that was Wednesday through Sunday. That figure is only 2nd in the history of 5-day openings to none other than The Dark Knight which grossed a cool $203.8 million in the same time frame last summer.
Transformers 2 also came in second to The Dark Knight for the biggest opening day gross, getting $60.6 million and $67.1 million respectively. As for Transformers 2’s conventional opening weekend (Fri-Sat), it was the 7th biggest ($112 million) grossing film in history after The Dark Knight, a Shrek movie, two Spiderman movies and two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. However, because Transformers 2 opened on a Wednesday instead of the regular Friday, it has the record of having the highest 5-day total for a movie to have been released on a Wednesday. Spiderman 2 is second in that regard when it grossed $152.4 million from Wednesday to Sunday back in 2004.
Combined with the $186.1 million the movie managed to gross in other countries across the world, it takes the total worldwide gross for the movie to $387.3 million as of Sunday.
As things are right now and how things are going for Transformers 2, it doesn’t look so good for me and my top 10 grossing summer movies predictions list.
Here is a recap of all the numbers:
I’m sorry for going on about all these numbers. If you didn’t understand a word of what I was saying, I apologize. I’m just amazed by how much money what is a pretty average movie can take in. I guess at the end of the day all this commercial success is spawned from the incredibly dense and interest-generating marketing campaign for the movie. There were so many posters, trailers and TV spots shown in theaters, on TV and on the Web, it was so overwhelming.
For me, all the hype building up to the movie only made the movie so much worse than it really was. The buzz for the movie was so alluring it gave me more expectations on top of my already high expectations from after the last movie, and I ultimately got let down. Makes me think twice about getting too sucked into the whole viral/publicity/marketing campaign thingamabob in the future.
What is my point? My point is, I use to love trailers and posters, and I still do. But you have to keep in mind that the trailers of movies will sometimes be better than the movies themselves. This was exactly the case for Transformers 2. Kudos and congratulations to Paramount’s marketing department are in order, I guess.
If you have any thoughts on the matter, don’t be afraid to drop me something in the comments below.
Source: Box Office Mojo
2 comment/s:
wow, u blogged abt Transformer 2 for a number of times
numbers showed the percentage of moviegoers that actually cared about reviews...
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