Industrial Light and Magic/ DreamWorks PicturesMichael Bay, take a deep breath.
Should projections hold, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, opening at midnight on Wednesday, shortly will become the No. 1 movie of the weekend, the summer—and the year.
Says Chris Thilk of the trend-watching film blog Movie Marketing Madness: "Nobody is unaware of Transformers."
Certainly not judging by advance ticket sales. Fandango was reporting opening-night sellouts in locales as seemingly remote as American Fork, Utah. MovieTickets.com was reporting 66 sellouts in New York and Los Angeles alone. (E! Entertainment and Fandango are both owned by Comcast.)
Accordingly, the box office trackers at Exhibitor Relations are calling for Revenge of the Fallen to join the ranks of all-time hits with a five-day take of $165 million.
"Not quite Dark Knight numbers, but it's not out of the question, either," says Exhibitor Relations' Jeff Bock. "The buildup to this is intense."
The Dark Knight, the second-biggest grossing film in Hollywood history, scored a record $158.4 million in its opening weekend last summer; at the end of its first five days, the Batman opus had collected a record $203.8 million haul.
If Revenge of the Fallen, already off to an "extraordinary" start in the United Kingdom and Japan, per Bock, comes up with a mere $165 million by the close of multiplex business on Sunday night, it'll outdo every Harry Potter movie yet released, and all but one Star Wars movie. On the list of all-time fastest starters over the first five days, the Shia LaBeouf-Megan Fox giant-robot movie will rank fifth, supplanting Spider-Man 2.
The big projections are enough to prompt a big question: Why on Optimus Prime-coveted Earth is—or, rather, was—Michael Bay so worried?
A May 4 email from the director to his bosses at Paramount Pictures, leaked last weekend to TMZ, revealed Bay's concerns that Revenge of the Fallen was going to go the way of The Island, the 2005 sci-fi film—and the lone bomb on Bay's considerable box office résumé.
"Am I missing something?…Right now we are not an event," Bay wrote. "We are just a sequel, which is very different. There is no anticipation."
According to Thilk, Bay, who in a June 6 email, also leaked to TMZ, reversed course and applauded Paramount's "hard, dedicated work," was not missing something: The original Transformers movie did get a bigger push than Revenge of the Fallen is getting.
"The campaign [for the new movie] is fine in that it's big enough. I just don't know if it's loud enough," says Thilk, citing a lack of trailers and a website that "doesn't seem very robust."
"I did get the sense that there were some punches pulled."
Bock agrees—and thinks it was the smart move: "They don't need to be plastered on every billboard."
And to that point, Thilk agrees: The Transformers' core audience, which, per the online ticket sellers, seems to be just about every male (and a whole lot of females) under the age of 34, just doesn't need to be sold on Revenge of the Fallen.
Says Thilk: "I think the movie's going to do what it's going to do."
And don't worry, Mr. Bay. That should be plenty big.