Pacific Rim’s Impressive Internet Presales Are Quelling The Naysayers

By Nick Venable | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

kaijuAnybody sick of us talking about Pacific Rim yet? Chances are, it probably won’t stop until, I don’t know, it becomes the most successful movie in history! (That’s just a push to get you to go spend your money on the movie. We’ll probably talk about the flick more if it earns that distinction.)

As if the endless promotional material didn’t already have us busy, the incessant Mathematical Lords of All Cinema and their early tracking numbers have been keeping us on our Giant Freakin’ toes when it comes to Pacific Rim‘s potential box office numbers. The general consensus is that it might earn a low percentage of its monster-sized budget. (I’m sick of the word “flop” at this point.) Just two days ago, Variety pegged the film’s weekend gross ranging between $25-$35 million, making it comparable to the disastrous opening that Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger had last weekend. Meanwhile, Adam Sandler and Co. are poised to make something just over $40 million with the deer urine-soaked Grown Ups 2. You guys know this means we’d have to change from a sci-fi site to one that one only covers “white guys who used to be funny, and Chris Rock,” right?

But wait! From the same worrisome Internet comes hope! TheWrap reports Pacific Rim is currently bot-stomping the competition on online ticket seller Fandango, making up around 60 percent of their weekend ticket pre-sales. There are no hard numbers for us to crunch here, but it’s really the first time any good news has surfaced about the film’s financial future.

Which just goes to show everyone that not every film’s core audience feels the need to buy their movie tickets as soon as they’re released. We’re a hard lot to track when we don’t leave a trail.

A very recent and pertinent example of this is the huge weekend World War Z had despite all forethought that it would fail spectacularly. As with that movie, Pacific Rim is going to dominate markets overseas, particularly in areas where average moviegoers are more in tune with with Kaiju and mecha story elements.

What’s far more surprising than finding out that Pacific Rim may actually do well is the film’s current 72% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, based on 122 reviews. Granted, we knew all the positive buzz we told you about wasn’t necessarily indicative of the critical population as a whole, but it’s kind of ridiculous. At least it got a 98% audience rating, even though negative reviews still made it in.

This has been a blockbuster-filled summer, no doubt, and people may be getting tired of spectacle films clogging up the theaters weekend after weekend. But audiences themselves are why the summer movie season exists in its current formation. And so long as the spectacle has some brains behind it, we’ll take everything we can get our eyes on. Become part of the solution and head to Fandango now and get a free soundtrack song download with your ticket purchase. Cancel the apocalypse. Give del Toro a chance to make the 13 other features currently hanging out in his brainspace.