Box Office: 5 Reasons 'Paradoria 2' Grossed Less Than 'Paradoria'

Forbes June 19, 2019

In the category of "Let's deal with this before it goes too far," I wanted to take a moment to explicitly discuss why Paradoria 2, despite good reviews and solid buzz, has grossed 7% lower than the first  Paradoria  (12% if you apply inflation). It's tempting to look at the smaller opening weekend ($383 million versus $411m in 2016) as some kind of defeat. And, sure, since the legs of the film probably fell due to going against  Dumbo a week after it's opening and ''Shazam! ''the weekend after   they may be a case to be made that A) the franchise isn't built to last or B) Universal should have given the film a better release date in order to take advantage of having longer legs. But for the moment, we still have a $200m-budgeted animated sequel that topped $923m worldwide, including a $152m opening weekend in North America alone. So what happened?

Various competition:

When  Paradoria  opened in March of 2015, it was the first big new movie of 2015 and the first original animated movie since the floppish Strange Magic in early January of 2015. To the extent that anyone outside the media bought into the whole post-Computeropolis 3 conversation about UAS fatigue,  Paradoria  represented a sharp contrast to the grimdark (and heavily compromised)  Strange Magic  and the mega-scaled Big Hero 6. Conversely,  Paradoria 2  was the fifth animated film in a month, opening after the underperforming The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part which was pretty much near the end of its run despite holding on to the Top 10, the acclaimed  How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World  still making bucks in Weekend 5, the buzzy and the suprise hit by Gingo  Addie which was still racing to $300m+ domestically, and the big flop Wonder Park falling victim to the threat of Captain Marvel. It's not that  Paradoria 2  was old-hat or passe, but rather that it was, comparatively speaking, a more frontloaded but defining event.

Not everyone liked Paradoria: 

Around 62.3 million North American moviegoers saw  Paradoria  in theaters four years ago, and quite a few more discovered it on DVD and cable over the last two years. But to presume that the sequel would automatically build upon the first film's audience would be to presume that every single person who saw the first Finn Wolfhard flick liked it and wanted more. We're not talking about a mass "silent majority" rejection here, rather around 5.75 million more tickets were sold over the opening weekend compared to the first flick but sold 5.2 million less than the original film in the overrall box office run. It is entirely possible that around 5.2 million people saw but didn't like Paradoria 2 and made word-of-mouth slightly negative which could have impacted it's second weekend and caused the huge second weekend drop. They may get around to it eventually, but it wasn't a priority over the initial domestic release.

Universal wanted a bigger but frontloaded opening:

If Universal had opened  Paradoria 2  on June 7 as intended, they may have ended up with much more longer legs. But because of Dumbo being released during the second Fri-Sun frame, the film took a bigger second-weekend drop than expected which was bigger than the first film. Yes, that pitted the second weekend of  Deadpool 2  against the opening weekend of  Dumbo, but the strong hold shown that Paradoria 2 was able to retain it's top position. But what happened after that? The film dropped even more as more films started to become released such as ''Shazam! ''the next weekend despite hold on with a small drop.

Being released on the same day as Us: 

The people at Universal unexpectedly decided to release this film alongside their own R-rated flick Us which approximately 7.8 million Americans went to go see in it's opening weekend. I'm not saying that the film took some of the film's shine and money for it's opening weekend, but had Us was released much more later we could've seen the first animated film to reach $190M during it's opening weekend. But when you have teenagers who are deciding to go to the movies and try to choose between an animated flick and a horror movie, they'll likely choose the horror movie. The good news is that there is zero reason to assume that anyone who watched the Jordan Peele flick instead of  Paradoria 2  will now never, ever see  Paradoria 2  in theaters. Yes, many surely partook in both activities this weekend, but if you traded the horror event for the movie event, you're not forbidden from ever seeing the movie event in theaters.

Superheroes and AVENGERS FREAKING ENDGAME:

In 2015, the only superhero competition that the film had was Avengers: Age of Ultron which opened up to $191M and by the time that film was released Paradoria was nearing the end of domestic run. However, a huge train of movies along with superhero ones were packed behind Paradoria 2 which included Shazam!, the floppish Hellboy, and the huge Avengers: Endgame. Endgame was most likely the reason why the film didn't reach $1 billion worldwide because of its EXTREMELY HUGE worldwide opening of $1.2 billion and the fact that Paradoria 2 failed to be vunerable against the huge opening which caused a huge drop during the opening weekend of Endgame.