‘Star Wars’ Shows Its Staying Power

Friday Morning Update: Over the past few columns I have given Star Wars: The Force Awakens a bit of a hard time for finishing so far behind Jurassic World on both Twitter and Facebook in its debut trailer (224k versus 143k on Twitter and 700k versus 100k new likes on Facebook). However, in the past week I have been very impressed by its staying power as yesterday marked the 7th straight day that it was above 15k tweets on Twitter, Jurassic World only made it 4 days before it went below 15k after its trailer even though it started at a much higher number. I believe this is just a testament to the fervent fanbase who continue to debate about the new trailer. So while Jurassic World might have won the initial rounds of this head to head I believe Star Wars has come out on top in the long run.

Another big franchise debuted their first trailer yesterday: Terminator: Genesys. The film attracted almost 36,000 tweets yesterday which was enough to bump it up to the third slot on the week overall. No this isn’t close to the aforementioned films Star Wars and Jurassic World but the expectations here are not nearly as high as the last couple films debuted at $44 and $43 million in 2003 and 2009 respectively. The best comparison I can think of is the trailer for Robocop which had just over 25,000 tweets back on September of last year. Considering the lack of a-listers here (nope Arnie no longer counts), this is a pretty strong start.

Bringing up the rear in spots 4 and 5 were two of December’s brightest: The Hobbit: Battle Of Five Armies and Into The Woods. They have struggled in general in the weeks leading up to release and been way outside of the top 10 for much of the last month but they are now peaking at the right time and will hopefully light the box office on fire in the coming weeks, heavens knows it needs it.

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