We don’t know much about the motion picture space. Our engineers tend to despise anything seen as “conformist,” so they only see movies in the theater that nobody else has ever heard of. Except for the one guy who actually has a girlfriend and occasionally drags himself to a romantic comedy or two.
But since everyone else is so interested in them, we decided to start tracking some much-anticipated (or at least much-marketed) movies before they hit theaters to see if we can find patterns. A couple weeks ago we started tracking The Lorax Movie, which netted over $70M in box office receipts on its opening weekend. When weighted to the US census, it looks like 16% of CivicScience poll respondents will see it in the theater and another 26% will see it on video (N=8,166).
This weekend will mark the opening of Disney’s big-budget John Carter movie (N=4,239). It looks like far fewer people are planning to see that movie in theaters but a decent amount will watch it at home.
But then, let’s look ahead at the Hunger Games movie, scheduled to come out later next month (N=5,138). This one looks like it has great potential in theaters, with a full 23% of respondents expecting to see it in the theaters and almost half hoping to see it on opening weekend. Given that, it looks like fewer are expecting to see it on video (notwithstanding the die-hards who it in theaters and on video).
It’s too early to tell now but it will be interesting to see if we can find any correlations between our data and the ultimate box office success of these movies. Stay tuned.
