Box-Office Oracle: How Many Millions Will ‘The Avengers’ Assemble?

The two big tracking metrics were released, and they came in at $140 million and $160 million, respectively. If you’d like to follow along at home those tracking services are called Major Theater Chain (or MTC) and Reel Source (or RS). To go further down this rabbit hole, when MTC tracking is lower than RS, as it is for The Avengers, then you’ve got a great chance it will go lower than both estimates. For trivia’s sake, when MTC is higher than RS tracking the actuals tend to come in higher than both. Now then, there are exceptions (Inception was an actual $62 million off $48 MTC/$60m RS), but the warning flag has been raised.

Still, we can muddy these waters a bit more, yes? Our pals at Fandango (seriously, we do drinks) reported this morning that “More than 1,000 showtimes already sold out in advance of its Friday opening”. The anticipation is definitely there. Now throw in the $281 million The Avengers has cleared internationally and the picture looks particularly rosy.

I went so far as to try and work up some predictive power from Australia and the UK’s opening numbers, but there’s just not a large enough data set. Big films opening overseas prior to a domestic release is a relatively new phenomenon. Which brings us to the cold, harsh reality of prediction, the attempt at a middle. People definitely want to see this film, but theaters are only so big, and the targeted demo is a finite resource. I’ve placed it at $36k per theater, very healthy, but not enough to set the record for May (Spider-Man 3).

Prediction: $144 million