Guardians of the Galaxy 3: Reviewing the Range of Predictions

With Guardians of the Galaxy 3 about to kick off the summer movie season the range of predictions regarding the movie's box office gross discussed here may be of some interest. These are as follows:

* At the start of the year an analyst publishing in Screen Rant suggested $1.2 billion.

* Going by the inflation-adjusted performance of the first two Guardians films I considered $1 billion as the outcome were it to simply do as well as its predecessors (with a little over half coming from overseas).

* Considering how the last Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film did in comparison with its predecessor--how, as if the drops from film to film previously seen with Thor and Black Panther were not bad enough, Ant-Man 3's fell so far short of Ant-Man 2--I suggested a $700 million gross were Guardians 3 to see its gross drop in comparable fashion relative to Guardians 2 (as, with its domestic gross falling a rough sixth, its international gross closer to half, it winds up with a bit under $400 million at home, a little over $300 million more from overseas).

* Considering the expectations regarding its opening weekend I extrapolated a gross in the $700 million range from what the opening weekend meant for Guardians 2 (with $320 million at home, $420 million from abroad, $740 million plausible, though with the take easily less).

* Combining both the Ant-Man-like drop and the opening weekend now expected I got a gross closer to $600 million than $700 million, or even under the $600 million mark.

In all these you have a range from $1.2 billion down to half that or less in the relatively dark scenario I developed out of the combination of the precedent of Ant-Man 3, and the current, lowered, expectations for the opening weekend.

The high end of this range would be not just a morale-boosting topping of the billion-dollar mark for the MCU for only the second time since 2019 (the first was Spider-Man: No Way Home), but a series best for the Guardians movies.

The low end of this range would be very bad indeed for Marvel, given that Guardians is its best chance to demonstrate the franchise's continued health in 2023--while even calling into doubt whether the rather "pricey" movie would cover its cost.

Considering these numbers it is worth recalling that when Screen Rant's analyst offered the $1.2 billion estimate he also estimated that Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit. In fact it made it less than half that, which is what we would see were the movie to wind up with <$600 million.

I do not rule out the possibility of such a collapse. But presented with these possibilities I am sticking with the $700 million take, give or take $50 million, predicted by both the current expectations for the opening weekend and the Ant-Man-style collapse calculation as the most likely outcome--not what backers or fans of the MCU would hope for, but not the worst-case scenario for now.

And thereby ends the speculation about how the film will do on the basis of anticipations and precedents. Within mere hours the movie will be in theaters--and for the short period in which speculation about its box office take will still have any meaning, people will be doing it from real numbers as the ticket-buyers finally have their say, deciding whether or not, as I suspected, Chris Pratt's highest grossing film this year is the one that has already been playing in theaters for a month.