With the summer blockbuster season comfortably in the rear view mirror the numbers are in on what hit and what missed. According to the Hollywood Reporter though, the biggest thing to miss the mark wasn’t a film at all. It was tracking.
Why should we even care what tracking is, you ask? Well, the movie studios that dominate Hollywood basically rely on tracking companies – which use all sorts of research trickery – to predict how well a movie is going to go down. If movie executives are running around like headless chickens the Monday after their film is released, it’s probably because the tracking companies had predicted it would make more money than it actually did.
If the Hollywood Reporter’s data is correct, it sounds like there’s been a lot of hysterical running around this summer. The tracking companies got things wrong in 2015. A lot.
The key culprits the Reporter is fingering include Magic Mike XXL
Interestingly, none of the movies the Reporter points to had any trouble making a profit over the course of the summer. Both Ted 2 and Terminator Genysis raked in more than double their budgets, while Magic Mike XXL may soon have made back its cost eight times over. That these flicks didn’t make as much as studios were told to expect feels like it’s more to do with overestimation than actual underperformance.
We can’t blame movie studios for staring longingly at Universal though. With Jurassic World, Minions and Pitch Perfect 2
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