This Week’s Long Lead Tracking Grid: The New CHALLENGERS Poster Isn’t Helping…Yet.

CHALLENGERS remains one of the great tracking mysteries. A week after MGM released the poster for the CHALLENGERS, the film took a tumble in our weekly Long Lead Tracking Grid.

The film marrying director Luca Guadagnino and Zendaya is one of the most anticipated films of the spring. At least among industry observers. Do filmgoers want to see it? That remains unclear. Despite giving the poster a decent B+ grade, awareness and interest for the film are lukewarm.

CHAMPIONS, opening April 26th, belongs to the “Low” group, meaning we believe it to have a production budget below $50M. The average opening weekend for a film in this group is $9M. This week, CHALLENGERS slips from the “Average” to the “Below Average” bucket, meaning, at this moment, the film is on a path to open below that $9M average.

To be fair, the tracking data may not fully capture the poster’s impact. So we will have to wait and see if the film rebounds in the coming days. Having said that, a trailer was released six months ago, so we would expect somewhat higher levels of awareness.

Will Zendaya fans show up? It’s certainly possible. Does the tracking reflect a groundswell of support for the film? Not yet.

SEE THE FULL REPORT HERE

The Long Lead Tracking Report looks at films more than six weeks from release. Each film is given anywhere from 1 to 5 diamonds based on how the film is perforn The Quorum’s main tracking metrics: Awareness, Interest, In A Theater, and Pay To See.

Diamonds are assigned based on how well the film is tracking compared to other films in the same group at the same distance from release.

Films are then sorted into one of five buckets, from “High End” to “Low End,” based on the total number of stars across the four metrics as follows: 

Diamond (“Low End”). 7-8 Diamonds (“Below Average”), 9-14 Diamond (“Average”), 15-18 Diamonds (“Strong”), 19-20 Diamonds (“High End”)

You’ll notice a column with numbers in red. This represents the average opening weekend for the film’s group. Titles that sit at the highest buckets (“High End” and “Strong”) are well positioned to open higher than that number in red. Conversely, titles at the lower buckets (“Below Average” and “Low End”) are tracking to open below the number in red.