‘Suicide Squad’ total box office speculation

Monday Afternoon Update: Suicide Squad just obliterated the previous August opening record as set by Guardian Of The Galaxy ($94 million) with a stunning $135 million but as its Twitter weekend performance hinted at, its long term forecast might not be as rosy. Let’s first start by saying the movie is a hit and will make bucket-loads of money for Warner Bros., that is etched in stone, but the fact that it paired the largest opening day Twitter buzz on record and followed that with the largest two day decline in terms of total tweets and it would appear as though it’s going to have an equally impressive decline next weekend.

What immediately jumps out from the below table is that Suicide Squad had over 300,000 less tweets on Sunday than it did for Friday, no film has even seen that type of falloff. The closest any blockbuster came to that percentage of drop-off in 2016 was Ghostbusters this Summer thanks, in large part no doubt, to its poor reviews. What this means in all likelihood is that while Suicide Squad rules supreme over Guardians on opening weekend it will almost certainly not be overtaking it in terms of total box office receipts domestically ($333 million). To put that number in perspective a bit, the very similarly reviewed (that is, panned) Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice couldn’t even manage $333 million back in March after its even larger $166 million opening.

It is worth mentioning that by having a summer opening Suicide Squad would have had all kids and teens home from school to inflate its Friday numbers both at the box office and on Twitter. Then again so did Guardian Of The Galaxy a couple years ago and that had no where near the drop off (again presumably thanks to the ratings). With these big buzz declines in mind Suicide Squad is going to have a tough go of it trying to not have a 65+% fall on the upcoming weekend. The silver lining in these numbers was that its sentiment remained unchanged throughout the weekend, staying at 6 positive per negative tweet across all three days which might perhaps hint at the word of mouth being better that the reviews would seem to indicate.

Recent Twitter Opening Weekend Performances in the Superhero Genre

Tweets
Date Movie Fri Sat Sun Fri-Sat Drop Sat-Sun Drop
5/27/16 X-Men: Apocalypse 46,940 30,738 30,279 -34.52% -1.49%
08/05/2016 Suicide Squad 646,724 441,558 338,985 -31.72% -23.23%
05/01/2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron 166,674 120,859 113,023 -27.49% -6.48%
5/23/14 X-Men: Days of Future Past 101,610 74,271 67,445 -26.91% -9.19%
05/06/2016 Captain America: Civil War 154,810 120,132 98,245 -22.40% -18.22%
3/25/16 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 552,534 442,672 354,994 -19.88% -19.81%
01/08/2014 Guardians of the Galaxy 185,711 149,851 143,354 -19.31% -4.34%
02/12/2016 Deadpool 472,894 406,880 384,923 -13.96% -5.40%
04/04/2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 167,006 150,736 133,375 -9.74% -11.52%