Women, Hispanic, and Black audiences were under-represented:
(From Hollywood Reporter) Caucasians made up 62 percent of ticket buyers, followed by Hispanics (15 percent), African-Americans (10 percent), Asians (7 percent) and Native American and other (7 percent), according to PostTrak.
Especially when you consider that Hispanic and Black audiences spend more theatre dollars per capita than White audiences. Definitely room for Star Wars to improve.
A) The $57M in previews is not just free cash. That will lead to a bigger than typical drop next week, and will depress the weekend multiplier.
B) Bigger films tend to be frontloaded. We've had 35 films that have opened to $100M during their first weekend (counting Iron Man whose Thursday previews would have been lumped into the weekend gross by current accounting). The only one of those to have a 4x OW multiplier was Shrek 2 over a decade ago. Drop that 3.5x opening weekend multiplier and you add Toy Story 3 to the list. Technically Revenge of the Sith and Revenge of the Fallen make the list if you only look at their first Fri-Sun, but Sith made $124M in its first 3 days (3.06x multiplier based on that) and Transformers made $128M in its first 3 days (3.13x multiplier).
If you go look at films opening in the $40-75M range, you start to see quite a few with >3.5x OW multipliers. Not just animated films either.
C) December is data poor for huge blockbusters. Most of the bigger films were those $40-75M openers. Until this weekend, Avatar has been the only exceptionally large film (say big enough to crack the domestic top 25) out of December in over a decade. Star Wars is not going to play like Avatar.
