Weekly Unaided Awareness Chart – AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH Debuts And Some Super Bowl Erosion

About Unaided Awareness: “What upcoming movies are you aware of?” Each week, we ask thousands of people this simple, open-ended question. The results are what we call unaided awareness. It’s unaided because we don’t provide a list of films, artwork, or descriptions. The respondents have to know about the film on their own. Unaided awareness is highly correlated to box office performance. The thinking goes that if someone can name a film off the top of their head, chances are they want to see it. Because it is unaided, the numbers tend to be small but mighty. 

The Weekly Unaided Awareness Chart includes any film more than six weeks from release, registering at least 1% unaided awareness (UA). Early signs of UA more than six weeks out often translate to box office success upon release.

We are now two weeks post-Super Bowl and beginning to see some slight erosion. JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH slips from 5% unaided to a still impressive 4%. THUNDERBOLTS* drops from 4% to 3%, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—THE FINAL RECKONING falls to 2%.

Others have held. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON and THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS are steady at 2%, while LILO & STITCH climbed a spot to 3%.

Two horror films returned to the chart. FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is back after a one-week absence, and 28 YEARS LATER returns after being off the chart for six weeks. THE ACCOUNTANT 2 and M3GAN 2.0 couldn’t hold on and are now bubbling under. Speaking of which, SINNERS came so close to cracking the main chart, but sadly, this week, it didn’t even qualify for the bubbling under group. Next week, it enters the six-week window, meaning it graduates without ever having reached 1% unaided.

The big new addition is AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH. Like WICKED: FOR GOOD, we wouldn’t usually start tracking a film more than six months away from release, but we started to see a groundswell of unaided for AVATAR, so we decided to add the movie earlier than normal. The Christmas tentpole arrives with 1%, not quite matching the 2% for WICKED.

Elsewhere, SNOW WHITE scored the highest unaided of the week, making a big jump from 4% to 7%, leading to an increase in The Quorum’s opening weekend forecast for the film. LAST BREATH arrives in theaters with 2% unaided. NOVOCAINE and BLACK BAG crack the 1% mark for the first time, with the former reaching 2%.