by Benjamin Haines » Sun Oct 28, 2018 10:43 am
A domestic opening between $40m and $60m wouldn't necessarily be a death sentence for Aquaman in the holiday season. December releases tend to have longer legs as kids have several weeks off from school, a lot of adults are off work and families usually gather and have time to see movies together. Just this past year, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle opened to $36m over the pre-Christmas weekend and went on to make $404m in North America, an insane 11.1x opening-to-final multiplier.
A more mild comparison comes from the last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday, back in 2012 when Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher opened to $15m over the Dec.21-23 weekend but went on to top $80m domestic. If Aquaman opens to $40m-$60m, a similar 5x multiplier would lead to a domestic total between $200m and $300m. Couple that with a likely 33/66 domestic/overseas split and it would end up between $600m and $900m worldwide. While the low end of that could put it on par with Justice League ($229m domestic toward $657m worldwide), we're still talking about the very first Aquaman movie here so the bar for success is not the same. As long as Warner Bros. didn't spend an obscenely stupid amount of money to make Aquaman, it should be able to do just fine for itself if people like it.
A $25m opening for Bumblebee with a 5x multiplier could lead to a domestic total around $125m, in the same ballpark as Transformers: The Last Knight's $130m domestic. It would probably still top $400m worldwide in that scenario, so as long as Paramount spent significantly less on this character-specific prequel than the $217m they spent making The Last Knight, then Bumblebee can do fine too. Franchise lows don't have to be a bad thing.