Trailer Impact: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Most Remembered Trailer of the Week, ‘Alpha’ Creates Most Positive Interest

Welcome to the inaugural installment of Trailer Impact, a new weekly column on BoxOffice.com every Thursday.

Every week, our parent company Webedia Movies Pro surveys up to two thousand moviegoers from the past week in the U.S. and Europe. We ask two main questions:

1. Which trailers did the most respondents see and still remember, several hours or days after first being viewed? That’s the memorization score.
2. Which trailers sparked the highest percentage of positive interest among people who did see them, hopefully indicating a likely future view at a cinema? That’s the positive interest score.

Using data from our recently-launched data tool of the same name, every Thursday we’ll use the column Trailer Impact to reveal the top three for both categories, along with some analysis about what’s creating those positive marks.

The three most remembered trailers of the week:

Ant-Man and the Wasp

(Disney)

July 6

• 41% of moviegoers saw and remembered this trailer, its highest score to date and far higher than any other movie this week. Memorization score up slightly from 40% last week.
• The positive interest score stands at 76%, up slightly from a low of 74% last week. The peak was 90% in late April.
• Arriving on the heels of Marvel’s two biggest films ever, February’s Black Panther and April’s Avengers: Infinity War, the superhero sequel starring Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly looks to continue Marvel’s record breaking year.

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

(Sony)

July 13

• 28% of moviegoers saw and remembered this trailer, its highest score to date. Up a bit from 25% last week.
• Positive interest stands at 70%, exactly the same as last week. That’s down from a peak of 86% in mid-May.
• The third animated Hotel Transylvania installment, about a group of monsters trying to take a vacation from scaring humans, is currently tracking in line with its two predecessors’ mid-$40’s openings.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

(Paramount)

July 27

• 26% of moviegoers saw and remembered this trailer. That’s up slightly from 25% last week. The peak of 29% was in mid-May.
• Positive interest stands at 70%. That’s up slightly from 69% last week. The peak of 77% was shortly after the trailer’s February release.
• The sixth installment in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible action franchise is currently tracking to open the highest of any in the series. (Although some of the earliest installments from the 2000s would have higher openings when adjusting for ticket price inflation.)

The three trailers sparking the most positive interest:

Interestingly, all three of the most positively reviewed trailers this week come from Sony.

Alpha

(Sony)

August 17

• 96% positive interest score, the first week that the film’s second trailer (above) has tracked on our charts.
• 2% of moviegoers saw and remembered the trailer.
• The drama takes place several thousand years ago, featuring a boy separated from his tribe uniting with a wolf separated from its pack. Audiences are responding to the human-dog connection which has produced box office hits like Marley and Me and to a lesser extent A Dog’s Journey, along with the action sequences as the boy fights off woolly mammoths and the like.

Searching

(Sony)

August 3

• 93% positive interest score, its highest score yet and a surge from last week’s 57%.
• Fewer than 1% of moviegoers saw and remembered the trailer.
• The family-themed thriller follows a man searching for his missing teenage daughter primarily using digital tools, with the entire movie taking place on computer, tablet, and smart phone screens. The “family-themed thriller” genre was a huge box office breakout April with A Quiet Place, and the digital theme appears to be resonating with audiences in our increasingly interconnected society.

The Equalizer 2

(Sony)

July 20

• 86% positive interest score. That’s up from from 69% last week. The peak of 87% was in mid-June.
• 10% of moviegoers saw and remembered the trailer.
• The R-rated action sequel returns Denzel Washington as a retired CIA agent who dispenses bloody justice to his enemies. Fans of the original, which earned $101.5 million in 2014, seem excited to see Washington act in the first sequel of his decades-long career.

Trailer Impact is a service provided by Boxoffice Media parent company Webedia Movies Pro. To subscribe to the full service, which includes exclusive data about the top 25 trailers of the week, click here.