New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Jason Barney: My thought process all along was that Jurassic World would open solid but not strong, and basically be a bit of a disappointment over the long run. That started to change Thursday night and Friday, but I still thought it was going to be an "okay" opening for one of the tentpole films of summer. Honestly, I thought we were heading somewhere in the $75 million range. Well, I was wrong.

This explosive opening is one of the most surprising in years and easily will be the story going forward. To beat most people's tracking estimates by nearly $100 million is nuts. Chris Pratt has a lot to do with this, but this franchise has a lot of goodwill behind it as well.

Felix Quinonez: I really have no explanation for this. Even when I take into account the consideration all of the nostalgia factor, the very successful marketing and Chris Pratt I still wouldn't have put it much higher than $100 million. I guess it was just a perfect storm that created a juggernaut.

Ben Gruchow: I was shocked when the Friday numbers and weekend estimate rolled in; given hindsight, though, it makes more and more sense. I think three main things are responsible for the degree to which the movie exceeded expectations.

One, the timing. The market ended up being markedly more primed for a movie like Jurassic World than it should've been, owing to a surprisingly weak May at the box office. Age of Ultron opened to big numbers but relative audience indifference. Mad Max: Fury Road was a fantastic film, but it was also an R-rated sequel to an R-rated franchise. With the collapse of Tomorrowland, there hasn't really been a go-to family-friendly option in over a month.

Two, the marketing campaign. The trailers, starting with the very first one, were solid in the moment and read as exceptional in how well they package the film. This also goes for the truly brilliant JurassicWorld.com website; I have no idea empirically how many people it swayed in the movie's favor, but it went a long way toward doing the trick for me. Universal's marketing department conducted a master class in conveying tone, incident, and focus inside of a couple of minutes, and the campaign was absolutely solid without being groundbreaking in any way. It looked like fun. Breezy, undemanding fun, and that's something this season's tentpoles had mostly lacked.

Three (this is possibly the fuzziest of the three reasons, but it's the one that I believe had a critical effect on the size of the opening): Jurassic World is more or less standalone. Yes, there've been three movies in the series thus far, and thanks to this opening we can look forward to a sequel in three to four years...but the last film in this series was 14 years ago, and the franchise in general was fairly spotty by that point (one good film, two mediocre ones). In the space between 2001 and 2015, we've had a gigantic onslaught of multi-film and would-be multi-film franchises, where you can't hope to understand one without seeing the others (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, The Hobbit, X-Men, all 328 films and TV series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). You could go into Jurassic World cold, without boning up on the earlier films or catching up on a TV show or reading a book. I think that acted as an enticement to those people who are already exhausted from keeping track of which installment of which story is coming out when.

I think this last one will also have a beneficial impact on the movie's legs after this weekend. Initially, with the $204 million estimate, the movie's day-to-day percentage decline had me thinking that this might crater next weekend. With the official numbers in at $208.8 million, the day-to-day numbers and percentage decline are almost identical to the first Avengers, and we had a record second weekend then. Then again, the Avengers movies had Dark Shadows and Hot Pursuit to deal with, not a triumvirate of movies that're scoring above 80% with critics, one of which is the first Pixar original in three years.

Continued:       1       2       3       4