Captain America Knocks 'Em Boffo

Marvel characters continue to create awe and wonder at the box office with Captain America’s second offering, “The Winter Soldier,” setting an April box office record over the weekend by grossing an estimated $96.2 million domestically. It pulled in $110 million more overseas. The combined total is worthy of a classic “Boffo” in the Variety headline, with a story that points out that the sequel to the  2011 debut has already crossed the $300-million mark thanks to overseas openings the week before.

That “is all the more impressive when you consider that, while it falls beneath “The Avengers” and “Iron Man”3 and 2, it outranks many of the stand-alone Marvel character debuts, including both “Thor” films and the original “Captain America,” which it outgrossed by 48%,” writesEntertainment Weekly’s Nicole Sperling. 

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And “in the process” of setting the record, “it also validated the strategy of the film's distributor, Walt Disney Co., to ramp up its pipeline of films featuring super heroes made famous by bashing bad guys in Marvel Comics,” point out Reuters’ Ronald Grover and Chris Michaud. 

“The follow-up is certainly benefiting from the post-Avengers glow. Like the first ‘Thor,’ ‘The First Avenger’ launched to roughly $65 million domestically in July 2011. But the wild success of 2012's ‘The Avengers’ has seen fortunes rise for the ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Thor’ franchises,” writes Pamela McClintock in the Hollywood Reporter

“The audience “skewed male (64%), with 57% of ticket buyers over the age of 25,” McClintock reports. “The movie drew a healthy number of couples (58%) and families (23%). Teenagers made up 19% of the audience.”

Dave Hollis, Disney's head of distribution, “partially attributes the success to the film's universal story line,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Saba Hamedy. “There's a contemporary feel with the overall story,” he said. “It's not just an action movie but a character story.”

“Records aside, this is a testament to the momentum created within the Marvel universe for each of these characters to become something greater than themselves,” Hollis tells Variety’s Andrew Stewart, adding that “the film is well positioned  during spring break to take advantage of an already strong word-of-mouth play.”

It racked up an impressive 89% rating among critics and 95% for the hoi polloi on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer.”

‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ is still my favorite Marvel movie, but I dared not presume that the masses shared my enthusiasm, nor did I want to set the stage for calls of ‘disappointment’ if the film didn’t hit record highs,” writes Scott Mendelson on Forbes.com in a piece that offers a grain-by-grain analysis of which demographic watched which version of the film (3D, IMAX, plain old 2D) when. “I am thrilled to be a little bit wrong this weekend.”

Mendelson had postulated that the flick “wouldn’t get as much of a bump coming off “The Avengers” as “Thor 2,” writing “we all know how online chatter can be mistaken for comparative mainstream interest.”

Indeed, can digital data be used to measure “marketing effectiveness and predict box office success even before awareness turns into intent?” asks moviepilot.com CEO Tobias Bauckhage in Variety. Given that the company “help studios to optimize their social media campaigns, identifying, analyzing and activating the right audiences,” you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Bauckhage not only maintains that it can but also offered up a prognostication re: Captain America on Friday. 

“Social stats suggest ‘Winter Soldier’ will make Captain America Marvel’s second biggest box office star,” he wrote. No. 1 is “Iron Man,” which has the advantage of an additional movie title under its belt buckle (which is, of course, for sale on eBay). 

Bauckhagelays out his methodology for assessing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Search data. While cautioning about the limitations, particularly when taken individually, “compared to one another and in context of competition and genre benchmarks, they give a good impression of the performance of a movie’s marketing campaign and the audience’s appetite for the movie,” he writes.

“There are very few movie brands that are this consistent,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for box-office tracker Rentrak, says of the Disney-Marvel team in an interview with the AP’s Jessica Herndon. “For ‘The Winter Soldier’ to push on $100 million in April shows that you can release a big movie any time of the year. Every studio is going to be looking at this date to plant their flag in the future.”

Amazing how one boffo outcome can change everything, no?

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