Preface

• Hello, hello everybody!
• So I’m not a huge numbers guy.
• I’m good at math but it isn’t fun to do…
• But this summer, there were some really impressive records that were set or broken or both at the domestic and worldwide box office that I want to talk about.
• Some of them could merit their own individual posts and others are smaller, so I decided to just summarize them all in this ‘end of summer’ breakdown post.
• And these numbers are all subject to change, but as of August 25^th or so, this is what we got.
• And I’ll have my Top 10 (yeah, there’s a few more than last year…) Most Anticipated of the Fall coming at you guys real soon too.
• But let’s talk numbers!

Jurassic World – $1.6 Billion Worldwide

• This was ABSURD.
• Now, I wasn’t a fan of Jurassic World, but even if I loved it then I would still say: this is ABSURD.
• This movie beat out The Avengers for Biggest Opening Weekend of All Time, sitting at $208,000,000 just in THREE DAYS.
• I heard that and I was baffled.
• Maybe Chris Pratt drew people in? It could have also been a part of the ‘Jurassic’ name. Like they waited long enough for everybody to want to see these movies again.
• I saw this movie around 5 p.m. on the day it came out and there were a fair amount of people there, but nothing that would make me predict $200,000,000 in three days!
• I was baffled…
• But it didn’t stop there.
• This thing went on a rampage and currently sits at a nice 1.6 BILLION dollars worldwide.
• It beat the Avengers and is currently the 3^rd Highest Grossing Film EVER.
• After the opening weekend I was impressed, but I didn’t think the movie was super re-watchable.
• Take The Avengers for instance. Everyone who saw Avengers saw it at least twice.
• I thought Jurassic World would just fade out, but it dominated the box office for 3 full weeks! (Early estimates though 4, but we’ll talk about that next.)
• I was amazed.
• I’m not blown away often by movie results at the box office, because they are just numbers to a layman like myself, but this absolutely floored me.

Inside Out – $690,000,000 Worldwide

• So I go to school, and at my school we do these mini-concert things where students can perform and everything.
• And two of my good friends were hosting the final one of this past school year, May of 2015.
• And they pulled me up on stage while the acts were transitioning and asked me to talk about movies.
• So I said that I thought Inside Out would be one of the summer’s biggest hits because Pixar always knocks it out of the park quality-wise and money-wise.
• $690,000,000 is good, but what really made me happy about this movie (and made my prediction correct) is that this movie opened to $92,000,000 which is the biggest opening for any original property ever.
• Which is GREAT!
• Inside Out is probably my favorite movie of the summer, right up there with Mission Impossible and Ant-Man, so I was so happy to see it be that successful.
• Original properties are getting bad representation nowadays (Jupiter Ascending, Tomorrowland which I thought was okay), but Inside Out proves that original is good.
• Another thing I loved about how this movie performed is that it almost broke My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s record for highest grossing film to never hit number 1 at the box office during its theatrical run.
• That’s a cool record I didn’t know existed.
• And Inside Out ALMOST beat that record, but then it hit number one in I believe its third weekend?
• But good for Inside Out though, it deserved to be number 1 at least once!

Fantastic Four – $26,000,000 Domestic Opening Weekend

• Now a lot of people were surprised and appalled by how insanely low the opening weekend for Fantastic Four was…
• BUT NOT ME!
• I saw this movie on a Thursday and before I went into the theater with my friends, I told them that I thought this movie would be a huge flop.
• Not just that either.
• I predicted it would open to $25,000,000 even though analysts had pegged it for 40.
• And that is my proudest accomplishment of the summer.
• I guess if anything surprised me with this, it’s how insanely fast the numbers are dropping.
• I head that this past weekend (the 23^rd of August), that Ant-Man was higher on its 6^th weekend than Fantastic Four on its 3^rd!
• That’s insanely horrendous!
• I’ve heard estimates that Fox will lose between 60 and 80 MILLION dollars on this movie and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than that…
• I didn’t think Fantastic Four was awful, but it wasn’t that good.
• I’m just baffled by the 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and Josh Trank’s tweet, and overall just how fast the word of mouth spread and killed this movie.
• By the way, I heard reports that Trank’s tweet was estimated to lose the studio $10,000,000 dollars on opening weekend and even if that isn’t spot-on, it’s insane how much money one tweet can lose the studio…

Straight Outta Compton – $60,000,000 Domestic Opening Weekend

• Straight Outta Compton is a movie I haven’t seen yet, but I’ve heard really good things about.
• What surprised me about this movie is that it had the largest R-Rated opening in August, just narrowly beating out American Pie 2 (a movie that I guiltily love more than I should…)
• Two things stand out to me about that.
• The first is that American Pie 2 had set a record that I didn’t even know about, so cool!
• The second is that the N.W.A. was a popular group, so this is probably the exception not the rule, but I’m wondering if we’re gonna see more biopics coming out…
• If we do or we don’t, I’m looking forward to seeing Straight Outta Compton regardless.

Ant-Man – $58,000,000 Domestic Opening Weekend

• Some people thought Ant-Man was a flop, which I would completely disagree with.
• Analysts had it pegged for $60,000,000 opening weekend, and if that’s a flop, then my God…
• This thing has FAR surpassed its budget and is gonna be really profitable for the folks at Marvel and Disney.
• This was not a flop…

***

So guys, that’s my breakdown on the box office surprises of summer 2015! What are your guys thoughts on these results and what was the weirdest turn out in your opinions? Let me know in the comments down below, and as always, thanks for reading guys.