Facebook Watch – ‘Fantastic Beasts’ live up to the title

Monday Evening Update: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them continued its onslaught on Facebook this past week, using its trailer buzz to eclipse the 1 million like mark more than six months before release. Difficult to frame comparisons here for the film, but if you’ll indulge the link, Deadpool, a spin-off of a wildly popular franchise (and a character much more widely recognized than Newt Scamander) had 876,944 likes six months before release after its first trailer had dropped. Its no surprise that the prospects here are huge given the $7.5+ billion that the Potter franchise has earned over its eight movies. One studio who is no doubt curiously eying its performance will be Disney with its Rogue One spin-off scheduled to drop a month after Fantastic Beasts and also hoping to rake in as close to max franchise dollars as possible.

Suicide Squad added another 168,006 likes over the past week to bring its total up to over 2.3 million. The comparison everyone is no doubt looking most closely at is Deadpool and four months away from its release it had 1,398,228 likes, on its way to just under 3.5 million on the eve of its release. The overall buzz level here has been stellar for Suicide Squad as it has received huge levels of awareness and buzz for every snippet of new information dropped.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows doubled its entire like increase for 2016 in the past week thanks to its latest trailer. Buzz has been scant for the film leading up to its release, especially when you consider that the same period before the release of the first film had over 400,000 in new likes. The turtles might be candidates to decline in their second outing for a second time, just as their 1991 sequel did (it declined by 20% over the first film the year before).

Facebook Top 10 Movies by Like Increase for the last week Ending Sunday April 17th