No Trailer. No Poster. No Problem. Sony Is Late With BAD BOYS 4 Material, But It May Not Matter.

It was recently reported that BAD BOYS 4 wrapped filming ahead of its June 7th release date. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence celebrated the completion of photography with a joint social post. It was the first official image released for the film, which is now less than 90 days from release.

Will Sony make the June 7th date? There’s no reason to think they won’t. But, the studio is certainly taking its time in releasing material. There is no poster. There is no trailer. In fact, every single wide release scheduled to open between now and June 7th already has a poster and trailer.

At 87 days out, just how late is BOYS 4? For the sake of comparison, the initial trailer for BAD BOYS FOR LIFE dropped 135 days before the film’s release. The poster arrived 107 days out. So, yes, BOYS 4 is on the late side.

Ultimately, it may not make much of a difference. That’s because BOYS 4 is tracking like gangbusters. The film belongs to the medium group, meaning we believe it to have a production budget between $50M and $100M. The last movie had a reported budget of $90M.

The median opening weekend for films in the medium group is $16M, though films in this group can open north of $50M. CREED III debuted to $58M. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 opened to $74M, and newly crowned Best Picture OPPENHEIMER made $82M in its opening weekend.

Given that BAD BOYS FOR LIFE opened to $63M, Sony is no doubt looking for BOYS 4 to land near the top of this list. In other words, an opening near the median of $16M would be a massive misfire. As you can see above, BOYS is well ahead of the group average in each of the four key metrics at the same distance from release. But can it top the $63M opening for the last film?

To answer that, let’s compare BOYS 4 to CREED III and WICK 4, both action sequels. Looking at awareness, BOYS 4 (dark yellow) is slightly behind CREED III (light yellow) and WICK 4 (brown) at the same distance from release. As a reminder, both CREED III and WICK 4 had trailers out by now, meaning it’s pretty impressive that BOYS 4 is only a few points behind without the marketing material.

Even more impressive is the fact that BOYS 4 is actually ahead of both comps in interest. In fact, at 61%, BOYS 4 has the third highest interest score of any film currently being tracked by The Quorum behind DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE (65%) and DESPICABLE ME 4 (63%).

So, yeah, BOYS 4 is doing just fine without much in the way of official material. It all may be a moot point, anyway. It’s possible that Sony will be rolling out material in the next day or two to play in front of GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE opening this weekend. If the materials connect, imagine how high these scores could go.