Unless watching nubile young co-eds get torn to shreds is your idea of a good time, this weekend marks the end of the summer from a box-office relevance standpoint. Though at least things will probably go out with a bang: It has been widely predicted that The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love will each open to around $30 million in ticket sales, but what of the third major release hitting theaters on Friday, Universal's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? Good question! Ahead, Movieline handicaps its box-office bonafides.
Michael Cera
Let's start at the top. Universal might have hidden his face on the poster, but Michael Cera is in every frame of the trailer; he's Scott Pilgrim and this is his movie. Cera's track record at the box office has been underwhelming at best. Superbad is the high opening for him, but if you consider that the outlier, his other films have been somewhat disappointing: $11 million for Nick & Norah and the Infinite Playlist, $19 million for Year One (which he shared with Jack Black), $6 million for Youth in Revolt. Average those three out and you get $12 million -- and right now, that feels like the amount of money Cera alone can bring in for a movie: +$12,000,000
Built-in Fan Base
All six of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim books made the top 10 list of bestselling graphic novels last month, with the sixth and final volume -- Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour -- on top despite not coming out until July 20. That book sold out of its initial 100,000 printings within a few days of release -- an additional 50,000 copies were shipped to distributors -- and currently ranks in the top-50 on Amazon. So, there are many fans. But there aren't that many; this isn't Eat, Pray, Love we're talking about. If every person who purchased Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour buys a ticket to see the film over the weekend, they'll account for less than $5 million in grosses. Plus in the Venn diagram of hipsters, there's probably lots of crossover between Cera fans and Scott Pilgrim readers. As such: +$3 million
The Twitter Effect/Bloggers
According to Box Office, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World had a whopping 17,465 tweets posted about it on Wednesday, a number that accounted for 34 percent of all movie-related chatter on Twitter. According to a scan of my Google Reader, film bloggers are writing about Scott Pilgrim almost as much as they're writing about themselves. Of course, considering anyone who is posting/reading about Scott Pilgrim likely plans on seeing the film anyway, this doesn't seem to prove anything. In the olden days, they used to call this sort of thing "preaching to the choir": +$1 million
Date Night
Here's a place where Scott Pilgrim can really make hay: The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love are being positioned like a junior high dance -- boys on one side, girls on the other. Scott Pilgrim, however, can act as a compromise for couples looking to see something together this weekend. That those couples will probably have to be under-40 somewhat limits the box office potential, however... unless you think that people over-40 will want to see Scott Pilgrim, a position which seems tenuous at best: +$3 million
Intangibles
There is one thing going for Scott Pilgrim that neither Eat, Pray, Love nor The Expendables can claim in their favor: originality. Yes, it stars Michael Cera as "Michael Cera," but the world presented in the trailers for Scott Pilgrim is like nothing you've seen before. Not even Kick-Ass -- the last buzz-y graphic novel adaptation to hit theaters -- could claim that. In a summer that has found filmgoers starved for original material -- see: Inception -- don't be all that surprised to see Scott Pilgrim do better than anticipated based solely on the fact that it's different: +$3 million
Total Predicted Weekend Gross: $22 million