By all accounts, Josh Boone’s adaptation of the bestselling John Green tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars will be a force to be reckoned with when it opens in theaters on Friday. Just how huge the film about love-struck, cancer-stricken teens will be, however, is still unclear – but we know that the box office haul is going to be massive.
Today, Fandango noted that The Fault in Our Stars has out-paced the Rachel McAdams-Channing Tatum starrer The Vow, the film which had previously garnered the most advance ticket sales on the 14-year-old site. According to a non-scientific survey of 1,000 Fault in Our Stars ticket-buyers, 81 percent have read the book, and 80 percent plan to see the movie with a group of friends. Meanwhile, almost 65 percent said star Shailene Woodley, whose last film Divergent also opened to huge numbers, was a motivating factor in their buying a ticket.
One point to keep in mind: the gargantuan Twilight franchise is classified by Fandango as a fantasy romance, so the numbers that Fandango is crunching have not compared The Fault in Our Stars to the films in that series. Still, it’s impressive that The Fault in Our Stars, once considered to be a tricky film to market given the bittersweet subject matter, is performing so well, and it has a strong shot at stealing its opening weekend from competitors Maleficent (expected to drop a large amount in its second week) and Edge of Tomorrow, a sci-fi actioner starring Tom Cruise.
Some sites are predicting that The Fault in Our Stars, which cost just $12 million to make, will bring in over $30 million in its opening weekend, but chances are that the film will actually score a lot more than that.
The Fault in Our Stars opens June 6.
Based on the bestselling novel by author John Green, the romantic drama The Fault in Our Stars tells the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), who fall hopelessly in love after meeting in a cancer support group, and experience a whirlwind romance that teaches them both what it means to feel truly alive. Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe co-star.