Weekend Box Office: Who Watches the Watchmen? Everyone!

By Jeff Olson

March 6, 2009

The box office is about to get interesting. The last few weeks have seen some lackluster films, (Madea Goes to Jail, Jonas Brothers) but all that is now going to change. The weekend box office report is back with a vengeance because of one monstrous film which Is bound to make a killing. That film is Watchmen. For this being a notoriously slow time of year for the box office, Watchmen may be the juice needed to give the dismal box office some life. This is the only major wide release this weekend and it not only has the weekend to itself – but pretty much the entire market since there is really no competition. So what kind of numbers can we expect the Watchmen to bring in? Let’s do some comparisons to see what we can expect these next three days.

This same weekend in March of 2007 Zack Snyder’s 300 hit theaters and completely smashed all box office records for the month of March. The stylized film based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller opened with an astonishing $70 million and went on to gross over $200 million in it’s box office run. Can Watchmen do similar numbers in it’s opening weekend? We will get to that in a few.

The prognosis is mixed for this one. Watchmen is a hard sell (even more so than 300). Alan Moore’s famous graphic novel has been considered an unfilmable story. The novel was a twelve issue series that was first published in 1986, and now over 20 years later director Zack Snyder has chosen to film this movie, and challenge the world to see if he can indeed make this movie watchable. So what does this movie have going for it? First, it has a huge following. Midnight shows across the country sold out last night and the pre-sales for this movie were higher than 300 before it was released.

Can this movie attract more than the fanboy audience? I think the opening weekend will be huge. The buzz for this film is huge and everywhere you look there is a good chance you will see a person reading the bright yellow covered novel. It is the hype that is building for this movie that is going to fill theater seats. Whether you are a fan – or if you even know what the hell Watchmen is; you gotta go check it out just so yo can talk about it at the water cooler come Monday morning. People still do that right? So chances are you will get on the bandwagon (if you aren’t already) and you will be the reason Watchmen is number one this weekend.

Weekend Prediction: $75 million.