Putting ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Opening Projections In Perspective
Typically when a big film like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them hits tracking boards, we’ll scream to the sky some big number. But tracking really indicates a stateside opening range of $68M-$85M for the first title in the Harry Potter spinoff series.
NRG has the David Yates-directed movie at $75M, so I hear, and the film is strong among females under and over 25. Rivals aren’t knocking these opening figures, despite the fact that three Harry Potter movies out of eight opened to north of $100M, with the lowest-grossing debuts being the fifth (The Order of the Phoenix, 2007) and sixth installments (The Half-Blood Prince, 2009)at $77.1M and $77.8M, respectively. We have to consider for a moment that Fantastic Beasts isn’t specifically based on a huge bestselling property (in fact it’s a fictitious textbook used by Hogwarts student in the movie) in the way Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was when it opened to a then-record of $90.2M in 2001.
Fantastic Beasts as a sister series to a mega franchise could emulate The Hobbit at the box office in the long run. Although Hobbit titles largely improved upon The Lord of the Rings’ three-day debuts (arguably an apples-to-oranges comparison since all three LOTR were five-day openers), in the end, no one Hobbit title exceeded the domestic runs of an LOTR title. Then again, forecasts could swell as Warner Bros is vigorously prompting Fantastic Beasts; it feels like every billboard in Los Angeles is devoted to the movie.
A month prior to Fantastic Beasts‘ November 18 release, Warner Bros held a global Imax fan event to kick off excitement for the film, with pic’s stars split between London and Los Angeles. During the event, Rowling announced there would be five movies in the Fantastic Beasts series. Fantastic Beasts takes place 70 years before Harry Potter in New York City. Newt Scamander (Eddie Redrayne) rrives to the Big Apple, accidentally unleashes a beast from his suitcase and rubs up against New York’s secret community of witches and wizards. Colin Farrell stars as Percival Graves, Jon Voight as Henry Shaw Sr., Katherine Waterson as Porpentina Goldstein and Alison Sodul as Queenie Goldstein,
At the global kickoff two weeks ago, Fantastic Beasts producer David Heyman teased that the upcoming movie will feature a cameo by a young Albus Dumbledore as well as another character from the original Harry Potter movies, Gellert Grindelwald. In addition, each Fantastic Beasts sequel will be set in a different capital city around the globe.
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