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Rogue One Box Office


Poe Dameron
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  • $29 million in Thursday night previews. Highest of 2016.
  • $71.1 million opening day. 3rd highest this year. 12th highest all-time.
  • $155 million opening weekend (estimate). 3rd highest this year. 12th all-time.
  • $290.5 million worldwide.

That $155 million is pretty close to where expectations were coming into this weekend. A mild drop from what they'd hoped of about $10 million, but that's close to a rounding error. It'll be interesting to see how it performs during the week. The Force Awakens had great weekend numbers, but where it was a BEAST was in how it performed during the weekdays. If Rogue One has a winter holiday run that even approaches that, it will be a phenom of a lesser order.

 

A couple little headwinds though. Not all students are off for Christmas break yet. Due to a quirk in the calendar, The Force Awakens had an absolutely perfect schedule. It was released the same day as most students got out of school and Christmas fell on the next Friday. It was pretty much the Christmas Break of Star Wars last year as box office records fell on a daily basis for two straight weeks.

 

Rogue One is not so lucky. Many schools districts will be in session for the next week. Furthermore, the traditionally bad day at the box office that is Christmas Eve is next Saturday, a day where you'd expect that Rogue One would have the biggest day remaining in its run. So that will hurt.

 

Furthermore, the competition is a lot tighter this time around. While The Force Awakens had a surprise hit with Daddy's Home for its second weekend, it was just so big that it didn't matter. Rogue One has to deal with Sing, a movie that will definitely take a bite out of its family audience, an audience that is already limited a bit by Rogue One's tone.

 

All that being said, I still expect big weekday numbers for the next three weeks. It could challenge Finding Dory's $486.3 million for the top movie of the year, but I think it will settle into 2nd place this year, above Captain America: Civil War's $408.1 million.

 

We'll see on Tuesday what sort of weekday numbers we can expect. That'll make things a lot easier. As an experiment in Star Wars side movies go, this is definitely a big success.

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Put me down for $600m. I feel if Doctor Strange can cross that mark then this will have no problem doing the same.

 

You must be thinking of worldwide gross. The estimates from myself and Lucas1138 were for domestic. It'll easily go over $600 million worldwide. I'm guessing between somewhere between $900 million and $1 billion.

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I always figured it would make about half of what TFA made. I figure it will still come in roughly at that.

Question is-- what does it have to make for Lucasfilm and Disney to consider the experiment a pass. The idea of anthology films not connected to the saga is still a risk to them. R1's performance will determine the future of more anthology films beyond the ones already in production.

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I always figured it would make about half of what TFA made. I figure it will still come in roughly at that.

Question is-- what does it have to make for Lucasfilm and Disney to consider the experiment a pass.

 

Money :)

 

Is there a general rule of thumb for determining advertising budgets for blockbusters? Would imagine it's pretty massive for this one.

 

It's comparing pretty favorable to TFA in the early going on Rotten Tomatoes. General Audience reviews (source: my facebook feed) have been overwhelmingly positive. It'll continue to make money and pretty easily get over that $400M range I think, which qualifies it as a domestic success.

 

Looks like the general spread for Domestic Gross as a % of Worldwide gross ranges from the low 20s (movies the world has a weird obsession with, Fast/Furious, Transformers) to the mid to high 40s that are more US centric. Using my $415M prediction it would seem going over $1B worldwide seems like a safe-ish bet. Hard to say through only one weekend of course. But you'd think that would be an unmitigated success for the first attempt at the standalone films.

 

Iron Man 3 might be a pretty good comparison. 400M domestic, 1.2B worldwide. It was part of a big franchise, coming off the high of Avengers, but was also pretty underwhelming iirc.

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I always figured it would make about half of what TFA made. I figure it will still come in roughly at that.

Question is-- what does it have to make for Lucasfilm and Disney to consider the experiment a pass.

Money :)

 

Is there a general rule of thumb for determining advertising budgets for blockbusters? Would imagine it's pretty massive for this one.

 

It's comparing pretty favorable to TFA in the early going on Rotten Tomatoes. General Audience reviews (source: my facebook feed) have been overwhelmingly positive. It'll continue to make money and pretty easily get over that $400M range I think, which qualifies it as a domestic success.

 

Looks like the general spread for Domestic Gross as a % of Worldwide gross ranges from the low 20s (movies the world has a weird obsession with, Fast/Furious, Transformers) to the mid to high 40s that are more US centric. Using my $415M prediction it would seem going over $1B worldwide seems like a safe-ish bet. Hard to say through only one weekend of course. But you'd think that would be an unmitigated success for the first attempt at the standalone films.

 

Iron Man 3 might be a pretty good comparison. 400M domestic, 1.2B worldwide. It was part of a big franchise, coming off the high of Avengers, but was also pretty underwhelming iirc.

Most movies just have to have an ROI that makes a profit once the budget is recouped.

 

Mega franchise movies have so much marketing, cross platform plans, and secondary objectives that the money line is higher.

 

Look at Age of Ultron. Made a ton of money and set records, but Marvel and Disney weren't happy with the end take and considered it a failure.

 

Are they expecting R1 to top TFA? If so and it doesn't are they taking in factors like saga entry vs. not? Or the fact TFA was the first SW in a decade?

 

If they don't expect TFA numbers they will have some goal that if not met could effect the production of the other anthology films.

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Well a 17.6 million domestic Monday, which to my untrained eyes seems very strong. Catching Fire, which Lucas used earlier as a possible comparison, had an opening roughly equal to Rogue One with 158 mil. It;s first Monday was only 12.3, compared to the 17.6 of Rogue One. It's a similar story for the original Hunger Games which opened to 152 mil and then had 10.8 on Monday. So the first clue to Rogue One's legs is very good.

 

More generally, I think we could be underestimating the movie here. We've all seen the opening compared to other movies but I didn't realize just how much it beat the old December record by. The December record prior to TFA was 84.6 million by the first Hobbit movie. Rogue One pulled in 155. That destroyed the old record. It's pretty darn impressive.

 

Then when you look at potential legs, as I said Lucas compared it to the first 2 Hunger Games movies which both had their opening weekends represent about 37% of their gross. That number would be crazy high for Rogue One. If you look at the biggest December openings of all time, they all had much better legs than having their opening represent 37% of their gross. Out of the top 20 December releases the highest for percent of total gross represented in opening weekend are "I am Legend" at 30.1% and Oceans Twelve at 31.2%. None of the other top 20 are even at 30%. The first 2 Hobbit movies came in at around 28%. Rogue One would have to have awful legs for its opening weekend to represent over 30% of its total gross.

 

When you look at Mondays gross and I'd say the overall positive critical reaction and word of mouth and I think it's hard to believe that Rogue One will have bad legs. If you give it a 30% number which would not even be good for a December release you end up with a total gross of about 511 mil. If you give it the Hobbit movies legs it would have 553. If you up it and give it 25% which isn't crazy you are at 620 mil.

 

The more I thin about it, it seems unlikely the movie doesn't get to 500 mil domestic. Unless having XMas eve and New Years eve fall on a Saturday really hurts it.

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The Force Awakens had 40 on its first Monday and 31 on it's second. LOL, Crazy stuff. Rogue One's Monday is only the 24th best ever but alot of the others are holiday weekends like Memorial Day or July 4th weekend or at the least in the summer when kids are off school. As a novice I'd say the 17 mil Monday is pretty darn good and keeps it on track to come in around 500 mil.

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$17.6 million sounds about right. Be interesting to see how big a chunk Sing takes out of it.

 

For the anthology films, I can't imagine that Rogue One won't at least earn enough to justify its existence. It's also doing pretty much exactly what you would think it would. It's not a ultra-monster like TFA, but it's going to be in the conversation for biggest movie of the year.

 

The question to me is more of whether having a Star Wars movie come out every year is hurting the mainline series by cannibalizing the audience and not making the new movies as special. I think we can all recognize that a huge reason TFA did as well as it did was pent-up demand. The reason that Star Wars remains special at all is because Lucas, for all his flaws, didn't cash in half as much as he could have on the brand, releasing only 5 sequels in the 35 years he was in charge of it.

 

Now 5 sequels are scheduled to come out in a 3.5 year period. A pace literally 10x as fast as it was during the Lucas years. There's going to be fatigue there, the same way Marvel fatigue has set in. It's not a bad problem to have as the Marvel movies are still doing quite well even if Age of Ultron and Civil War aren't doing ZOMG numbers like was hoped. But it is a concern.

 

And the concern will shoot up as soon as one of the movies is a real disappointment. That Han Solo project is something that I have very little faith in at the moment.

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I don't see any franchise fatigue setting in any time soon. One Star Wars film a year doesn't seem unsustainable. Like superhero films, Star Wars can be a backdrop for any kind of story. Rogue One was a gritty war film. Han Solo's story could be a comedy, or a heist plot (or a bit of both). The Boba Fett film might be a western. We could have more political conspiracy thrillers, if they want to go back to the Old Republic era. Maybe they'll go back a couple hundred years with the anthology films and have a younger Yoda deal with Jedi stuff.

 

Any kind of plot can unfold in the Star Wars universe. With that creative freedom, it should be a long time before people get tired of Star Wars on the big screen.

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I don't see any franchise fatigue setting in any time soon. One Star Wars film a year doesn't seem unsustainable. Like superhero films, Star Wars can be a backdrop for any kind of story. Rogue One was a gritty war film. Han Solo's story could be a comedy, or a heist plot (or a bit of both). The Boba Fett film might be a western. We could have more political conspiracy thrillers, if they want to go back to the Old Republic era. Maybe they'll go back a couple hundred years with the anthology films and have a younger Yoda deal with Jedi stuff.

 

Any kind of plot can unfold in the Star Wars universe. With that creative freedom, it should be a long time before people get tired of Star Wars on the big screen.

As SW fans we can all see the endless possibilities for this franchise. The general viewer however still needs to be conditioned to not expect every film to be connected to the Skywalkers, Vader, Han and Chewie, etc. Rogue One was a good starting point to start moving away from the main OT heroes but we have yet to see how a film without any of them will play to the general audience.
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Friday update:

 

Friday take: $22.8 million.

Total domestic: $244.8 million

Worldwide: $442.7 million

 

Finding Dory tracked to $236.5 million by its second Friday. And, if you take away the Thursday previews from both, Rogue One's Friday hold was actually slightly better than Finding Dory's 49%. Though don't be surprised at all if the Saturday total sucks. Christmas Eve is a day when box office traditionally takes a noticeable dip. It should have a great Christmas to partially make up for it though.

 

The competition managed to take a small but noticeable chunk out of Rogue One's weekday totals, but it survived the encroachment of Sing rather well. Poor Passengers. How much do you have to mess up for a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, two money in the bank stars, to pretty much be buried? Either way, there won't be another wide release movie until the next Underworld on January 6, so Rogue One is a safe bet to stay #1 for at least the next two weeks. Be interesting to see if Rogue One can beat out Underworld: Blood Wars. On one hand, Underworld is one of those franchises where you wonder just how the heck they got up to five movies. But each one of them have been in the $20-25 million range its opening weekend, which is right around where you'd expect Rogue One to be that weekend.

 

Anyway, bottom-line for its domestic total looks to have it falling just short of Finding Dory for the title of #1 movie of the year. Eyeballing it, I'd put its final domestic total to be somewhere around $445-475.

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I think you are a little light to be honest. The movie is at 313 after this weekend. Kids are off school this week and then next weekend is a holiday weekend too. I'd think it will be around 400 by the time next weekend is over. After it's third weekend Catching Fire made another 90 mil or so. Id expect this to perform at least that well. My guess is that your upper estimate of 475 mil is actually the lower estimate. I'm more thinking like 480-510 or so.

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Weekend update:

 

3-day Weekend: $64.4 million

4-day Holiday Weekend: $96.1 million

Monday estimate: $31.7 million

Domestic total: $318.1 million

Worldwide: $555.5 million

 

 

 

I think you are a little light to be honest.

 

I am indeed. Monday's take blindsided me. If that Monday number holds, it will be a record for highest 2nd Monday ever. It will have a better Monday after Christmas than The Force Awakens did during its epic run. Even taking into account Christmas, I didn't have it anywhere near that. I had it somewhere around half that. It'll probably comfortably outpace The Force Awakens next Monday as well and maybe even every weekday next week thanks to some schools still being closed another week.

I was previously using Finding Dory as a guidepost (still am to some degree). Rogue One had a better opening night, but Finding Dory was outpacing it on a daily basis. On Saturday, Finding Dory actually passed Rogue One in its daily tracking by $4 million, but suddenly fell $20 million behind the pace again today.

 

So, yeah, $500 million is back on the table. If it gets there, it'll only be the 7th movie ever in that club.

 

 

 

After it's third weekend Catching Fire made another 90 mil or so

 

Bad example. Catching Fire had long legs due to the Christmas holiday season. It actually got a 15% bounce in its 6th weekend. Rogue One is the opposite, it's leaving the holiday season and entering the January deadzone soon. Not saying it won't make $90 million (like I said, next Monday and next week will be interesting), just that the two are not comparable.

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