That’s the contention of Thomas from Jedi Temple Archives.
The Hollywood Reporter has released an interesting article about the correlation between YouTube trailer views and box office success on opening weekend. Independent tracking website “Box Office Reports” analyzed data for 421 movies released in the US since 2017 and the Hollywood Reporter looks at the findings in the article.
And according to the findings YouTube trailer views are a good, but not perfect gauge for box office success on opening weekend. The correlation between the trailer views and opening weekend box office is 0.86, which means there is a significant positive correlation between YouTube trailer views and box office (with 0 meaning there is no correlation at all and 1 meaning it’s a perfect positive correlation, 0.86 is a very high correlation).
Rise of Skywalker has the fewest trailer views for a sequel trilogy movie by far. Either the hardcore fans who used to watch a trailer 10 times only watched it once or not at all (and thus inflated trailer views for TFA and TLJ before) or general interest is really not all that high.
Based on the trend from the trailer views, Rise of Skywalker should have a better opening weekend than Solo which made $84.4 million on its opening 3-day weekend, $103 million if you include Memorial Day, but it would have a much worse opening weekend than both Rogue One ($155 million) and Last Jedi ($220 million). I think Disney would be very disappointed if Rise of Skywalker only made about $120 million on its opening weekend. It’s almost unimaginable even that Episode IX will not be a huge hit and outperform at least Rogue One and Last Jedi. But according to the trailer views it may actually perform much worse than both.
You can read the rest of the article here.
My prediction that Episode IX would do less than Solo at the box office initially seemed like an outlandish idea to the uninitiated. But as time draws closer to the opening of the film, all signs are pointing to disaster.
Originally published here.
