In my latest mission to try to write more stuff for what I was once hoping to be a thriving blog, a thought occurred to me about this coming weekend, which I’m now writing about for the third time. That title may seem strange, because when you think of “Groundhog Day,” you likely think of the 1993 Harry Ramis movie in which Bill Murray plays a man who keeps reliving the same day. But no, that’s not what I mean by this being a “Groundhog Weekend” so let me explain.
So you know how on the faux Groundhog Day holiday, the groundhog comes out of his hole and whether he sees his shadow or not will determine if we’ll have six more weeks of winter or not?
In the same way, there’s something about this weekend that makes me think it might set the bar for the rest of the summer, whether we’re going to get a lot of blockbusters able to surpass $300 million domestically (we only got one last summer) or we’re just going to get a lot of smaller hits that barely scrape together $100 million or more.
Everyone knew very early on that Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Age of Ultron was going to be a big hit and probably the biggest movie of the summer, and with $300 million under its belt already, that’s already set a high bar for the rest of the summer with very few movies looking to be strong enough to pass it.
For instance, Mad Max: Fury Road doing well (or at least better than most expectations) could pave the way for other retro-relaunches like Jurassic World and Terminator Genisys to do similarly well. Pitch Perfect 2 doing huge numbers could set things up for more women-driven comedies like Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck and even Magic Mike XXL to bring in similar business. Both this weekend’s movies might exceed expectations because reviews have generally been good. As far as those other movies mentioned, many of them haven’t been seen by anyone yet, but if they’re able to turn things around and get favorable reviews, we’ll know there’s an audience ready to see them.
It seems like the month of May often sets the barometer for the rest of the summer like last year when three movies in the month opened over $90 million showing that moviegoers were itching for entertainment. This summer already kicked off with such a big movie and that was close on the heels of Furious 7, so some might wonder whether anything coming out between Mad Max and Jurassic World will be able to find an audience or whether they’ll already have been sated.
Just as there are movies with definite interest coming up like Jurassic World and Minions and even Magic Mike XXL and Entourage, there are just as many movie where there’s a question mark whether they’ll live up to early hype and expectations. The fact is that when writing about box office and making predictions, there’s only so much information available and so much of the unknown. No studio makes a movie thinking it will bomb, but every summer there are bombs and there are also much-hyped movies that fail to live up to early projections as well. For instance, not a single person thought that Guardians of the Galaxy would end up being the summer’s biggest movie over Transformers and other “sure-things.”
And that brings us back to this weekend. A couple of weeks ago, it seemed like one of the weekend’s releases was being deemed to be a sure-thing and the other was thought to not have a chance due to rumored “poor tracking.” Now it seems like we could have two movies opening over $40 million, maybe even over $50 million, which believe it or not, is a rarity.
Then again, they both could end up doing less than we and others have predicted and then we can go back to worrying about the box office being down from last year and lots of the upcoming tentpoles not doing as well as expected. Hopefully, it’s the former because good movies that do well just leads to more good movies. At least that’s what this groundhog hopes whenever he sticks his head out of his hole.
