This is a very important weekend for one studio in particular. Warner Bros. has been trying to catch up with Disney in regards to super hero movies and the shared universe concept. It has been a tough act to follow, and the performance of Suicide Squad will be an indicator of just how far they have come, or need to go, to match the earning potential of Marvel movies.
Suicide Squad
There has been a great deal of marketing around this movie. There have been a slew of trailers, and that branding has paid off well. It is dominating Twitter, and, at the time of writing this, has had over 216,000 tweets for the day of August 4th. To put that in perspective, the next most talked about movie on Twitter is Ghostbusters, which has just shy of seven thousand tweets. It has also been seeing a lot of Facebook likes added to its page, and is one of the year's most talked about movies on social media.
Even though it is performing well on the internet, that doesn't mean much past the opening weekend. What is really going to pay off in the long run is continued word of mouth, rather than just pure anticipation.
But, we are not here to talk about the future of the movie, but rather the opening weekend. The trailers for the film look to inject a lot of fun into the movie, something that has changed from its original trailer. I think it is equal parts the effects that Deadpool would have had, showing that there can be comedy and laughs integrated with the action, as well as the fact that Batman v. Superman fell flat on its face after opening weekend.
There was a lot of reshuffling that happened with the movie after Batman v Superman faltered. What this means is that there have been massive reshoots, and the tone of the film has changed a lot from what it was originally intended. The final product is not doing well on Rotten Tomatoes, scoring only 29% at the time of writing this. That will mean little to the opening day, but if it really is a flat movie as the critics suggest, it could pose a problem as the weekend continues and could make the film incredibly front loaded on opening day.
Prediction: $125 million
Nine Lives
It may seem on the surface that taking big, authentic Hollywood names and placing them in almost any kind of film is the key to success. That almost feels like the strategy that is being taken with the film Nine Lives. It casts Kevin Spacey as a father who neglects his family for business aspirations, who is then transformed into a cat by Christopher Walken. He has a finite number of days to reconnect with his family in the form of a cat, or else he will spend the rest of his life as a feline. Sounds like a winner.
The problem is that the trailers look incredibly generic, and it has the feel of a straight to video release. There has been little awareness of this film, as boxoffice.com indicates that the movie doesn't even have twenty thousand Facebook likes. It has been almost non-existent on Twitter, and that looks to spell doom for the film. I have watched a number of family features this year, and I have never seen a trailer for Nine Lives screened. With the awareness low and no critical reviews out yet (which is never a good sign at this point in the release cycle), I see this film bombing and ending up on streaming services before the year is done.
Prediction: $7.5 million
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