Light the beacons, alert the media, and update your statuses: Hollywood has more or less lost the ability to consistently project hits and flops at the box office. We’ve seen it time and time again recently. A Minecraft Movie over-performed by $80 million-$90 million to become the largest domestic opening for a video game adaptation ever. Few saw that coming. The star-studded Amsterdam hoped to bake up around $15 million in its debut, but finished with just $6 million. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer charged way past its $40 million-$60 million expectations with an $82 million bow. In the post-COVID era, Hollywood executives complain that financial performance has become “increasingly difficult to predict.”
The growing divide between film tracking estimates and financial realities often sends Hollywood executives popping champagne on Friday and reaching for a Xanax by Sunday. Even if it’s the other way around, the implication remains clear: Hollywood needs better pre-release guidance. To adjust to a new media marketplace defined by TikTok teens and apathetic adults, studios must evolve the metrics they use to project performance. To paint the most accurate picture, studios must flank awareness with interest, theatrical intent, and willingness to pay a fee.
Limitations of Awareness Alone
If you’re like us, then you know that the iPhone’s weather app will leave you woefully unprepared for the elements at least once a week. The film industry suffers the same lapses. The old ways are like a thermometer trying to measure the temperature in the room. But what Hollywood actually needs is an entire weather station to capture all the other factors at play like wind direction and speed, humidity, and cloud cover. Traditional metrics like awareness may have once reliably predicted box office performance. But in an era ruled by familiar intellectual property, converting that awareness into actual ticket sales tells an entirely different story. (It’s going to take more than a fancy popcorn bucket). Recent entries in the Marvel and DC franchises provide perfect examples.
Captain Marvel rode an intense wave of fan enthusiasm between hard-to-replicate cultural phenomena Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame to more than $1 billion at the global box office. Its 2023 sequel, The Marvels, wasn’t so lucky in its attempt to unite two characters from Disney+ series with the big screen heroine. Adjustments were needed when the same wave of enthusiasm never materialized.
Marvel’s ubiquitous brand propelled the movie to a 60% awareness score in its week of release. Yet survey respondents who said they would see it in theaters stood at a middling 55%, according to Greenlight Analytics’ film tracking service The Quorum. That doesn’t meet the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s usual standards and the results proved that out. The Marvels delivered the MCU’s smallest opening weekend ($46 million), domestic total ($84.5 million), domestic multiplier (1.83x) and worldwide gross ($199.7 million). Thanks to a bevy of factors, initial awareness didn’t translate to sustained engagement. At all.
DC’s The Flash endured an even wider gap between awareness (70%) and theatrical intent (50%) in its week of release. The Flash, boosted by the brand of the long-running CW TV series but burdened by the poor performance of the big screen DC titles that preceded it, stalled out with a $55 million opening en route to just $108 million domestic and $271 million worldwide. Just because audiences knew about the film didn’t mean they intended to buy a ticket. The divide between the two pre-release served as a big bellwether for its performance.
IP-driven franchise films aren’t the only victims of this growing gap. But they remain the most susceptible to overblown awareness failing to drum up hefty theatrical business. So to better understand how a film will perform, sometimes the inverse relationship proves just as important.
The New Box Office Conversion
From Game of Thrones book readers to fans who loved Sabrina Carpenter in her Girl Meets World days, everyone loves to stay ahead of the curve. In the same way, utilizing data and analytics like film tracking data earlier in the process can put studio decision-makers in the driver’s seat to lead the pack (yes, I did just see F1). Movies with lower awareness but high theatrical intent often lay the groundwork for a film to over-perform box office expectations. Meanwhile, steadily rising interest speaks volumes about consumer favorability.
Sony’s It Ends With Us may remain ensnared in a never-ending behind-the-scenes drama. But the money-making movie presented a clear hit-to-be on paper. In the week of its release, the film registered just 38% awareness, yet boasted a healthy 51% theatrical intent. This implied that those aware of the movie hungered to see it. The marketing campaign worked to sell the frothy romantic drama, as it saw interest rise across its final eight weeks pre-release from 42% to 51%. That sort of steady lift implies compounding waves of viewer enthusiasm, especially when compared to many blockbusters that see interest start high and then stagnate across the last few weeks pre-release.
Respondents who said they would pay a fee to see the movie (63%), either in theaters or via video on demand (VOD) at home, suggested the movie would enjoy a long-tail of revenue-generating engagement. Ultimately, converting that low awareness to theatrical interest at such a high rate, and eliciting high fee-based interest, led to a $50 million opening, roughly $20 million more than expected. The movie went on to earn nearly $150 million in the US and Canada alone against a $25 million budget. (This was the moment where film tracking data nerds said “I told you so”).
The upcoming horror sequel The Black Phone 2 exists for the same reasons. Despite the original’s modest 44% awareness at the time of release, theatrical intent stood at 50% prior to opening weekend. The film’s spooky hook, a supernatural phone that connects you to the dead, and the effective marketing of Ethan Hawke’s masked villain resonated with viewers. It proved exactly the type of film that worked in both theaters and at home, as its 66% willingness to pay a fee score (and my sleepless night post-viewing) highlights. Similar to It Ends With Us, it also enjoyed a nine percentage point increase in interest over its final eight weeks pre-release.
Of course, high pre-release scores are not always a guarantee. Even with strong awareness, interest, and theatrical intent, studios must activate those audiences and sustain momentum through release to translate potential into performance. Still, interest, spearheaded by theatrical intent and willingness to pay, serve as the fresh KPIs for cinematic resonance today. But even the most evolved criteria can ring hollow if studios don’t understand who their actual audience may be.
Moving Beyond the Four Audience Quadrants
None of this matters unless a film’s promotional campaign is effectively doubling down on its core target audience and strategically broadening out to new viewers. A four-quadrant blockbuster appeals to both men and women, young and old. Any given hopeful tentpole feature hits a ceiling on earnings if it only focuses on the fan demographic that’s already invested. One reason Pixar once stood as the box office gold standard is because adults enjoyed the films just as much, if not more (I openly wept during Inside Out. No shame) than kids.
Top Gun: Maverick stands as arguably the perfect popcorn prestige movie. But it didn’t “save Hollywood’s ass” just because it delivered quality. Paramount Pictures mounted an incredibly effective marketing campaign that snagged the attention of multiple demos.
As a Tom Cruise-led action movie, male audiences naturally served as the core target. It should come as no surprise that the film’s awareness scored a rollicking 68% among men in the week of release. But as a legacy sequel to the 1986 original, and with the help of co-stars Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm, the movie scored an unexpected 70% awareness among women 35 and over. Even more impressive given the age of the IP: theatrical intent actually ran higher among audiences under 35 (62%) versus over (56%). Men, women, old, young. Boom—that’s how you soar towards nearly $1.5 billion globally.
This multi-quadrant appeal isn’t limited to long-awaited blockbusters. In the same vein, signals showed that Final Destination: Bloodlines would out-perform industry expectations earlier this year. This time, it came down to largely increasing scores among different ethnic backgrounds in the week of release.
That sort of widespread and diverse buy-in suggested the film boasted varied appeal among movie-going audiences. A robust $50 million opener knocked the question mark from the end of that thought.
Without an understanding of the driving audience demographics, awareness can often inflate and mislead on its own. Instead, Hollywood must begin delving deeper into the strengths and weaknesses of a movie among demographics both aligned with the core target and beyond. This will help optimize a film’s marketing strategy and activate audiences needed for success. It reflects a transitional moment for Hollywood away from broad reach and towards more targeted and intertwined measurement.
Actionable Box Office Takeaways
The new gold standard isn’t raw recognition. It’s readiness. Studios continue struggling to recover from the pandemic, dual Hollywood labor strikes, the Los Angeles wildfires, a production exodus, and increasingly bifurcated viewing platforms. A new normal demands a new framework of success, and that requires new tools. Awareness remains a highly valuable attribute. But it represents just one piece of the puzzle. Layering interest, theatrical intent, a willingness to pay and granular audience insights on top of it enables Hollywood to get off its backfoot and start being proactive in the fight for audience attention. The data already sits at our fingertips. The question is whether Tinsel Town will listen before suffering through its next $200 million surprise flop.
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