Hmmm, look what I found… Let’s dust this off a bit. And add some disjointed ramblings.
We don’t go to the movies much anymore. For a variety of reasons: ticket prices too expensive, not much out there we’re interested in seeing, too much of a time commitment, movie going experience kind of sucks, etc. But there are a few movies that I’m looking forward to this year. Not because I plan on watching them. Rather, I’m curious to watch the box office performance.
One of my hobbies is keeping track of the box office performance of selected movie franchises. There are eighty-one franchises that, for a variety of reasons, I collect information on. The numbers that I look at are: the domestic box-office (includes the United States and Canada), the worldwide box-office and the number of tickets sold in the domestic market (I feel this allows a better comparison across years than the dollar figure).
I'm going to have to add a few franchises to the spreadsheet this year. This is because the first movie performed good enough to gain admittance (in all of these cases the particular metric is that at least one movie in the franchise has to make more than $200 million worldwide) and they were just waiting for the sequel to come along. So I'll be tracking Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 but it's more of a formality than anything else.
Of more interest to me are franchises that are on the bubble and may make the cut depending on the performance of the next installment. None of these movies are expected to go crazy worldwide so the particular requirement that I'll be looking at here is a franchise domestic box office total of more than $200 million. Some of these movies are good bets: all Big Momma's House 2, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Origin, The Grudge 2 and Saw III have to do is maintain the previously established box office (70%, 67%, 81% and 67% of the domestic take of the last movie, respectively). Others are long shots and would have to perform significantly better than the first movie (Final Destination 3, Garfield 2, Sin City 2 and Jackass 2). There are a few that really don't have a chance in hell - both Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion would have to triple the first installment. And then there's The Omen 666 which is triply damned because it would have to make more than the highest grossing movie of the set, the franchise has made less money with each installment and it's been more than two decades since a movie in the series was released. So we'll see.
But the movies that I'm looking forward to most are from series that I'm already tracking. Depending on how well the next installment does, these movies could (and should, in some cases) rise in the rankings. I'll have to go into more detail at a later date but, for the record, these movies are: Scary Movie 4, Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men 3, The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, Superman Returns and Casino Royale. And I could pretty easily be arm-twisted into going to see a couple of these (hint: This message will self destruct in 10 seconds, or, What's Captain Picard doing in a wheel-chair?). It's the summer sucker in me. Although I guess May isn't technically summer.
Hmmm, all this number talk sure sounds like "sound and fury, signifying nothing", doesn't it? Whatever keeps me off the street, I guess...
