Night Owls

Fair points from an everyday accounting view, folks, and I can respect looking at it through the practical lens of keeping the lights on...

Either way, the bottom line ends up in the exact same spot. When you burn through your entire paying pool in a seventy-two hour marathon, you leave nothing on the table for May. That kind of borrowing from the future always comes due.

I am taking my nephew to see it over in Edinburgh next week myself, and like OffByOne says about Rotterdam, I expect we will have plenty of elbow room in that theatre. We will see how fast those numbers fall off a cliff once the dust clears.

TheyKnow wrote:I am taking my nephew to see it over in Edinburgh next week myself, and like OffByOne says about Rotterdam, I expect we will have plenty of elbow room in that theatre.

Enjoy Edinburgh with your nephew, and we will let the actual second-weekend returns test our hypotheses.

Edinburgh should be grand. Once the keen crowd clears out, we will see if ordinary punters fancy sitting in a dark room for three hours on a Tuesday. The actual receipts will tell the story soon enough, not the talk beforehand.

It is pleasant to see everyone settling on sensible business reasoning. When a theatre manager discovers a lineup of willing customers at an ungodly hour of the night, turning the projector on is just sound operations. There is no need to imagine hidden schemes behind standard commerce.

That said, accommodating that opening crush all at once does not create new filmgoers out of thin air. An initial surge of advance reservations merely serves the most impatient fraction of the market early. Whether the global box-office total can truly threaten the standing record will not be determined by whatever astonishing opening figures the studio publicists announce on Monday morning.

We will only discover whether the title is genuinely in jeopardy once this first rush subsides and the actual audited receipts arrive across ordinary weeks of everyday business. For now, I shall simply mind my promise to my grandson on Saturday and keep my eyes firmly away from the newspapers.

Sysop_Kev wrote:Once the keen crowd clears out, we will see if ordinary punters fancy sitting in a dark room for three hours on a Tuesday. The actual receipts will tell the story soon enough, not the talk beforehand.

Punchcard and Kev have put their finger on the exact truth of it... What counts is what happens on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon once real life gets back in gear.

Those first reviews hitting ninety-eight percent today might help grease the wheels for this weekend, sure, but glowing press never paid for a seat on week three. Out in the real world, folks have jobs, kids, and daily chores to attend to. When a picture demands three full hours of your evening, you cannot just casually decide to drop by after supper on a whim. That sort of commitment is fine for the superfans camping out at midnight, but your everyday working public will look at that clock, think about getting up early the next morning, and simply stay home.

So yes, let the early crowds have their fun and let the initial tallies hit whatever astronomical sums they manage. Avatar held on because normal people kept drifting in week after week right through the spring, whereas here you have all the fuel tossed onto the fire in four days flat. We will see what remains once the smoke blows away.

Heading out the door right now to pick up the kids from school and take them straight to our local cinema! The foyer is going to be an absolute zoo this arvo, but seeing all those sold-out sessions just proves how much of this business is being crammed into opening week. Everyone in Melbourne has been talking about nothing else all day, yet once we all walk out of the cinema this evening, that is literally our tickets accounted for. We certainly will not be turning around to sit through another three-hour block next week when school nights and dinner routines take over again! That 98% review score will get the curious crowd through the doors before Sunday night, but it cannot change the fact that casual viewers have limits on their free time. It really does feel like a massive sprint that is going to leave the box office completely out of breath by early May. Will report back later tonight on how the crowd handled the mammoth runtime without dropping any spoilers at all

kookaburra99 wrote:We certainly will not be turning around to sit through another three-hour block next week when school nights and dinner routines take over again!

Have a wonderful time with the kids, my friend, and let us know how they manage that long sit!

You hit the nail right on the head about family routines... Once you get past the opening burst, normal life takes over. A family cannot just drop everything to carve out another four hours on a school night, especially with homework and early alarms waiting the next morning. When you front-load an entire city into the first week, there simply is nobody left to buy a second round of tickets come mid-May. Enjoy the show, and we will watch what happens to the aisles next week!

kookaburra99 wrote:Heading out the door right now to pick up the kids from school and take them straight to our local cinema!

Enjoy the show with the young ones, kookaburra, and mind you keep the plot to yourself.

TheyKnow wrote:Those first reviews hitting ninety-eight percent today might help grease the wheels for this weekend, sure, but glowing press never paid for a seat on week three.

That is the critical distinction. A high percentage on Rotten Tomatoes merely indicates general critical approval among the initial batch of reviewers; it does not reduce the running time or alter the realities of domestic scheduling.

Today marks the general release here in the Netherlands as well, and looking at the timetable for Path, virtually all screenings until Sunday are heavily booked. Yet that merely confirms how concentrated the interest is. An adult with domestic responsibilities cannot treat an evening running past three hours as an impulse purchase. When the early surge concludes, that lack of repeat footfall will become obvious.

Watching the clock at my desk right now, absolutely buzzing for tomorrow! But it's true what you say, that reviews hype won't fix work shifts and school runs. You can't just nip out casually for four hours door to door. Once the mad opening weekend rush is done, casual punters simply won't have the time to keep the tills ringing.

The critical reception is certainly noteworthy, but one must separate enthusiasm from empirical longevity.

A score of 98% across some fifty initial reviews confirms competent craft, but it does not alter the physical barrier of a 181-minute runtime. For an enthusiast, three hours is an event; for a broader, casual public balancing work and family routines, it remains a serious logistical commitment.

To keep our analysis structured:

1. Early critical approval predominantly accelerates advance reservations among people who were already planning to attend.
2. Word of mouth cannot shorten an evening's schedule for working households once ordinary weekly timetables resume.
3. The real indicator of whether this threatens Avatar will not be the monumental Sunday gross, but the percentage decline on the second weekend.

Until we have the actual Monday tallies and the subsequent weekday hold figures, the hypothesis remains that high compression simply accelerates the inevitable plateau.

Summary: Reviews accelerate opening uptake; they do not manufacture free time for casual viewers later in the month.

Follow the MONEY, folks... when the first mad wave breaks, the empty seats will tell the real story.

TheyKnow wrote:Have a wonderful time with the kids, my friend, and let us know how they manage that long sit!

just got back and the crowd was exhausted by the end, nobody is doing that twice lol.

kookaburra99 wrote:just got back and the crowd was exhausted by the end, nobody is doing that twice lol.

The reported first-day figure from China illustrates this pattern rather neatly: an estimated $107 million in a single Wednesday, with nearly $30 million of that from midnight and early-morning sessions alone.

That demonstrates immense operational throughput, but it also means the most determined portion of the market is being cleared immediately. Taking children or sitting through an exhausting three-hour run on a school night is an exceptional event, as kookaburra observed, not a repeatable habit.

Avatar's total relied on sustained, casual footfall spread over months. Clearing out the keener patrons in 72 hours does not expand the addressable audience once standard routines resume next week.

Blimey, over a hundred million in China already, but exhausting folks means nobody goes back for seconds!