Back in May we took a look at searches for all the big summer movies, and attempted to predict the whole summer movie season. Now, with the last summer blockbuster (American Pie 2) dropping out of the Lycos 50, it's a good time to go back and analyze our hits and misses.
There's no doubt that we had one huge bulls-eye this summer. We'll be talking about our prediction for The Fast and the Furious for a long time to come. A film that nobody except us paid attention to, it opened #1 at the box office and so far has made over $140 million. Within a week a sequel had already been planned. The movie even peaked at #7 on the Lycos 50, higher than any other movie this summer other than Pearl Harbor.
On the flip side, we made one huge mistake, one we've been kicking ourselves for all summer. We predicted that Shrek would be "a major disappointment." Instead, it was the highest-grossing film of the summer.
It's difficult to figure out where we went wrong here. The best guess we can make is that perhaps children's movies that aren't based on previously known characters (such as Harry Potter) don't receive as many searches as other big movies.
The fact is that, despite making more than $200 million this summer, Shrek never appeared on the Lycos 50. It never got close. During its most popular search week (May 20-26), it received only half as many searches as the #50 item (The X-Files).
On the other hand, just as Shrek continued to rake in the box office while other summer movies plummeted in their second and third weeks, it also kept its search traffic week after week. Five weeks after opening, Shrek had lost only 23 percent of its maximum search traffic. Contrast that to other summer movies like The Mummy Returns (down 68 percent in five weeks) and Swordfish (down 80 percent in five weeks). There's no doubt that Shrek was by far the most popular movie this summer when it came to positive word of mouth.
When we looked at this summer's movies, we said that The Mummy Returns, Pearl Harbor, Jurassic Park 3, and Planet of the Apes would be the summer's biggest blockbusters. Those movies ended up coming in #2, #3, #4, and #6 for the summer behind Shrek.
What's #5? Read below, as we review our other predictions:
-- We said that Angel Eyes would disappoint. Verdict: Correct. This Jennifer Lopez-starring mystery isn't even among the top 50 highest grossing films of the year.
-- We said that Tomb Raider would outdraw that other video game movie, Final Fantasy. Verdict: Ridiculously correct. Tomb Raider won by $100 million.
-- We said that The Animal would outdraw Rob Schnieder's last film, Deuce Bigalow. Verdict: Wrong. Deuce beats The Animal $65 million to $56 million.
-- We said that the remake of Rollerball was generating no online interest and would bomb. Verdict: Unsure, but pretty dead on. The hype on this film is so negative that the studio pushed it back to February 2002 in order to make changes.
-- We couched this prediction by noting August was four months away, but we predicted American Pie 2 would be a success while Rush Hour 2 would be a disappointment. Verdict: Correct, and wrong. American Pie 2 has been a big success, becoming the first film to remain at #1 for more than a week since Shrek. But Rush Hour 2 has also been a big success. It's the #5 highest-grossing film of the summer, and still climbing.
What about our other prediction, that actress Estella Warren would be the summer's breakout star? We'll attack that in a couple of weeks, when we take a look at the stars of this summer's movies to see which actors got the biggest popularity boosts from their starring roles -- and which actors saw their popularity boosts fade rather quickly.
TOMORROW: Lycos 50 second anniversary special!
FRIDAY: Fall movie preview!
