Oracle - December 2003

Oracle - December 2003

This Oracle is posted December 19, 2003.

The Lord of the Rings, Return of the King will gross $1,050,000,000 dollars worldwide. The gross will be split as follows: $400 million in the United States and $650 million in the worldwide category.

Two days after release, the Return of the King is running roughly 25 percent ahead of The Two Towers in box office revenues. Also helping, arguably, is that ROTK is, in my view, against less competition than its predecessors were. In the previous two years, the films were up against the first two Harry Potter films. The next Potter film will apparently be out in the summer of 2004. Also, it seems that the quality of the other films currently out is not as strong as they were at the end of 2002. I submit these ideas because if you compare the trajectory of box office revenues from the first two films, TTT "faded" significantly after the 4th week whereas FOTR had some legs when it first was released.

There is a third element that will contribute to ROTK's success and that is that it is becoming clear that there are new fans being picked up by the films as they have been coming out. It is hard to say how many of these bandwagon jumpers are out there, but they are out there.

The difficulty in making this prediction is a 3 out of 5.

Back to Oracles Page

Go to Home Page