Since we are on the topic of box office, a lot was made of how 2015 was going to be Disney's (Buena Vista's) year at the box office. It totally was, just no one saw Universal coming out of no where and out-topping that.
Humour me as I apparently get way too much joy staring at box office numbers.
BV last year became only the third studio ever to cross 2 billion domestically. They still had a fantastic year before Star Wars as they tied for second fastest studio to 1 billion all time. Universal of course blew through those records and managed to hit a billion dollars by June 14th. Something could be made of how BV managed it with a much smaller slate of films than either Uni/Warner have required in the past... For better or worse, the tentpole strategy is currently working with Disney in that regard.
What I'm particularly impressed by is how well position BV is again this year. Studios are a bit boom and bust from one year to the next, Universal as a point of contention will not be speeding past 2 billion again this year. BV actually looks (in part thanks to the spill-over of Star Wars) positioned to do even better this year on certain metrics.
In order to overtake the fastest studio to 1 billion record set by Universal last year, they need to achieve that by June 12th (since it's a leap year), conveniently which is a Sunday. They've already made 284 million and will surely hit 300 as a very low benchmark from the films they still have in theatre now.
They have four major releases between now and then (Zootopia, Jungle Book, Civil War [which will have had 5 weeks since release] and Alice [which will have wrapped a full 3rd week in release]. It's also nice because we have really solid comparables for all films to at least gauge a starting point for what they might make:
Even being on the extreme conservative side: Civil war performs the same as Cap 2 (ok that's really conservative), Alice sheds nearly half the audience and is more like Cinderella (probably more on the likely side), BV is going to absolutely blow that fastest studio to 1 billion record out of the water. In fact, being that conservative they should be passing 1.1 billion by June 12th.
There's an off chance if Zootopia/Jungle Book perform impressively, and Civil War is the hit we are generally expecting - that they could overtake that record a full three weeks earlier! Certainly the opening weekend numbers for Alice should do the trick if they can't quite get there.
