Ant-Man Tracking for $65 Million Debut, But Marvel Studios Usually Beats Expectations

According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Tracking services have [] debuting in the $55 million-$65 million range, but may believe it will come in on the high end, considering Marvel's track record." By recent Marvel Studios standards, that's actually a bit on the low side, but it would actually be a victory considering Ant-Man 's lower-than-normal production budget ($130 million), soap opera-like development history, and seemingly goofy premise of a man who becomes teensy tiny and uses a helmet to control ants.

However, as I have covered in extensive detail elsewhere on the site [ here's the link], tracking services are almost always wrong these days when it comes to pre-release projections for big movies. The various tracking agencies used by the studios base their projections on historical data for similar movies, telephone surveys conducted at least 3 times a week in the five weeks leading up to the release, and various other factors. We treat their projections like weather forecasts when in fact their actual goal is to simply provide studios with ballpark figures which can help them decide where to spend their advertising dollars. A forecasting insider told Deadline, "We're not paid to predict box office, rather identify pockets of strength, threats and opportunities in the marketplace for the studio. ... It's a five-week journey with daily phone calls." The co-founder of what was once the leading tracking agency, New Research Group, told , "The real intention (of tracking) was to gauge advertising materials and where a film falls within the competitive landscape."

So, really, what that $55 million-$65 million range means for Ant-Man is that Marvel Studios now has a general idea of what kind of opening they might be in for if they change nothing about their marketing strategy from this point forward. They've probably also been given loads of demographic data telling them where pre-release awareness of Ant-Man is strongest and where it is the weakest. Maybe they were told they needed to do more to help audiences understand Ant-Man's connection to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So, they brought back Leslie Bibb's reporter character from the first two Iron Man movies, and made her the face of a viral marketing campaign in which a new MCU news infotainment program links the events of Age of Ultron to Ant-Man:

If the past is any indication, Marvel Studios will probably manage to grow Ant-Man's potential audience in the next two weeks and deliver an opening well above projections. They've done that now for every single movie they've released since The Avengers, only coming in under projections with this year's Avengers: Age of Ultron:

Iron Man 3