Box Office & Beyond.  Get The Numbers Here.

Search

 

advanced search   

 
 
 

 

 

The Star and Spider Wars

by E. Charl Hattingh

Continued...

The third battle of the box office war? Other summer box office behemoths.
The only real battle that Spider-Man will face is Attack of the Clones. By the time other big movies hit theaters, Spider-Man should already have made most of its money. Star Wars on the other hand will have to face off against big movie after big movie, week after summer week. Attack of the Clones will be attacked from all sides in the five weeks following its release. There are the movies mentioned above, plus The Sum of All Fears, Bad Company, Scooby-Doo, Windtalkers and Minority Report. Spider-Man will face off against only a few of those movies closer to the end of its theater run.

Who will be crowned the king of Summer 2002? The biggest thing of all is how people react to each movie. The fan bases are obviously there for both Attack of the Clones and Spider-Man. Both will benefit from repeat viewings from the hard-core fans. I have a feeling that Spider-Man will also draw in more families, which can mean great business for weeks to come.  AOTC could do better than Phantom Menace, considering that some fans didn't like Episode I but it still made $431 million. Advance word is that Episode II is much more to the liking of those that have seen it. Spider-Man is a comic book movie, which means big drop-offs from week to week. But it is also supposed to mean that it will drop on its second day of release, and it didn't. It actually did better!

The war of words between Spider-Man and Star Wars fans will rage for quite a while. Spider-Man fans will cry victory once Clones opens to less stellar results on its premier weekend. But fans of Clones should have the last laugh come the end of summer. Those of us that like Spider-Man and are Star Wars fans will just sit back and watch a fierce battle between two strong powers.

This animosity between fans of both sides could actually make for a more lucrative summer box office. I don't know if fans will go over and over just so that their movie can be the top grossing movie of the summer, but it could mean the difference between being number one and an embarrassing number two.

A note for Star Wars fans: Do you want Spider-Man to defeat Star Wars? If not, go out and show your support for General Lucas on opening weekend and do the seemingly impossible; Buy enough tickets for a $115 million Friday to Sunday opening (add Thursday receipts and Clones is well on its way to box office glory).

A note for Spider-Man fans: Do you want Spider-Man to shock the movie world by beating Star Wars for overall box office for summer 2002? Well, go out and see Spider-Man as much as possible before Clones premieres, setting the bar too high to reach. No matter what happens I'm going to enjoy everything that occurs over the next few weeks. I am a bigger Star Wars fan but I did enjoy Spider-Man very much (gave it an A- in my review). As a movie analyst, this is what I always hope for. Some real competition between two major movies. I was so thrilled to see that Spider-Man opened so huge and I can't wait to see what Attack of the Clones makes on its first weekend. It's all good!

And who knows, maybe we will all be surprised and that other spider movie, Eight Legged Freaks, will beat both of these.