Remember when The Hunger Games blew everybody's minds a few weeks ago by opening at $152.5 million and becoming the third-highest opening of all time? Turns out that might not even be the best opening weekend this year. The early tracking numbers are in for The Avengers, which opens May 4, and according to THR, the ensemble superhero film could be on track to open even bigger than The Hunger Games, and at the very least is set up to kick off the summer movie season with a monster weekend.
The numbers they picked up, just like the ones we wrote about for The Hunger Games before its opening, are a little jargony, but here are the big takeaways. It's the first-choice option for 23% of moviegoers, which is exactly the percentage who were into The Hunger Games when polled, and even higher than the 19% who picked The Dark Knight as first choice before that film opened to $158.4 million in 2008. 85% of those polled are aware of the movie, and 61% of them are definitely interested in seeing it-- those numbers were just 74% and 54%, respectively, for The Hunger Games, which means there could be a lot more people clamoring to see The Avengers opening weekend.
None of this is a huge surprise, of course-- given the success of all the previous Marvel films like Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, it seemed obvious that bringing them all together into a mega-film would be a slam dunk. But The Avengers is likely to not just be huge but massive, the stick by which all the other summer blockbusters will measure themselves. That is, of course, until The Dark Knight Rises comes along in July, with plenty of potential to blow all these numbers away. It's going to be a good summer, guys!
