Iron Man flies high... but falls short of Avengers!

The earnings of Iron Man 3 were never being looked at with the perspective of justifying the high production budget of the film or the heavy pay cheque of Robert Downey Jr. The movie was always going to recover the amount that went in making it by the time you had hit the snooze button for the sixth time before finally deciding to wake up on the weekend (a little exaggeration here!). So what is the real interest behind these set of numbers? To see really how big it can get, to watch a few records shatter, and maybe to say to generations later on that we were there. The Avengers last year showed us how gigantic of an industry Hollywood really is. And this year, the onus was on the shoulders of Tony Stark & Co. even before they flew to the theatres. So with the movie opening in USA last weekend, what is the verdict?

Smashing! With the second best opening ever in the US, Iron Man 3 has taken to the skies. Definitely superior to its two predecessors, Iron Man 3 though has fallen short of the one movie it was actually ever going to be compared against, The Avengers. Iron Man 3 reported first weekend earnings of $175.3 million at the US box office, higher than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II that had $169.2 million but still quite a way off The Avengers which opened with $207.4 million. Iron Man 3 has already crossed the $500 million mark in revenues from international markets though and is poised to become the 16th movie to cross the coveted $1 billion mark in worldwide revenues. Phew! Iron Man 3 has definitely benefited from the goodwill of The Avengers but it has generated strong positive publicity of its own too, which would be very much needed in the coming weeks when the 'fanboy' effect starts to fade. 

How will things shape up for Iron Man 3 from now on? Well, The Avengers had very strong reviews and yet fell by 50% in the second weekend. Iron Man 3 should at least see a similar fall if not slightly more (Iron Man 2 had a second weekend fall of 59%). Iron Man 3 is also expected to get knocked off from top spot in its third week when Captain James Kirk reappears with his crew in Star Trek Into Darkness, but should the drop in revenues for Iron Man 3 follow a similar pattern to The Avengers, it would be reaching its domestic $500 million mark by the end of its 10th week in the theatres. For the sake of making it more lively, we have considered the drop in fall in weekly revenues for Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, and then drawn its averages to estimate what would Iron Man 3 revenue chart look like for its first 10-week run. Something like this. 

Off the mark when you compare with The Avengers but still looks pretty solid on its own though. Disney will rake a lot of money out of this one, and that of course leaves them pondering over a simple question. How do you let go of such a franchise? A tough one for Disney, they got some real thinking to do.