Sequels Are Largely Unpredictable
The follow-up is typically supposed to do similar business to the original. Beloved part ones give their sequel extra gas and the ones that get a chilly audience reception often falter in theaters the second time around. However, if you were to look at the box office behavior of this summer’s sequels, you could think that How to Train Your Dragon got mixed word-of-mouth and The Purge was one of the most admired titles of 2013.
In fact, it was more like the opposite. The Purge drew much ire from horror fans, yet more of them decided to show up for part two, subtitled Anarchy, which outgrossed the predecessor by more than 10% in North America. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is off around 20% from its widely beloved original, and was expected to surpass the total of part one easily.
The Expendables 3, meanwhile, lost a lot of goodwill from its poor predecessors (and some viewers due to Internet piracy) and is expected to earn less than half of what part two made. Don’t even get me started on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which had its business die due to virtually no marketing and a lot of competition. Almost nobody could have predicted that these follow-ups would end up at these points at the summer’s start.
Meanwhile, the summer’s biggest sequel, Transformers: Age of Extinction, indicates just how the pattern of international grosses works these days. In North America, the third sequel to Michael Bay’s robot-fighting smash, it dropped more than $100 million from the third picture, Dark of the Moon. That would normally be a weary sign. However, in China – where the middle class moviegoing market has seen the most growth in the past five years – it outgrossed every American release in history, earning more than $300 million. (In comparison, X-Men: Days of Future Past, the second biggest American title in China, made under $120 million there.)