UPDATE 8/28: The test is underway. Coyote vs. Acme opened to $1.7 million in Thursday previews, with the audience score landing at 92 percent and director Dave Green telling the fans, “We won.”
UPDATE: Box office estimates now project a $15 million opening, built on $400,000 in sneaks and solid advance sales, the same core audience the tracking shows has been in place since July. Our full breakdown of the projection against the tracking is here.
The awareness finally moved. The interest didn’t.
The Quorum’s latest chart, published by Puck, has Coyote vs. Acme at 40 percent awareness and 43 percent interest, three days before its August 28 opening.
Back on August 4, it was stuck at 27 and 41.
You’ll note that is a big jump of 13 points of awareness in three weeks, but the interest only gained two.
The Quorum polls everyday moviegoers on whether they have heard of upcoming movies (awarness) and whether they want to see them (interest).
The latest two-week column is even worse. It covers the exact window in which the movie posted a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes debut and collected days of free press from it.
Awareness in that window: up eight. Interest: zero.
And that 43 percent interest is exactly where Coyote vs. Acme stood on July 7, before most people had heard of it.
So people finally heard about the movie. The audience didn’t grow. More than likely, they heard about the movie because of all the controversy surrounding it. However, at least according to the latest tracking data, that doesn’t mean they are interested, and this weekend’s box office will decide.
The Perfect Score Bought Attention, Not Interest
All summer, the theory was simple. Coyote vs. Acme had more interest than awareness, so the only problem was reach. Get the word out and the audience would follow.
The word got out. Awareness went from 27 to 40. The movie got a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score with the first batch of reviews and currently sits at 95%. Yet interest stayed at 43.
So Coyote got the attention and got nothing back.
Now The Fans Get Tested
Puck‘s Kim Masters previewed the opening, noting Ketchup Entertainment bought the movie for a reported $50 million and has an outside shot at earning that back domestically.
However, she left with a warning: “Online fandom doesn’t necessarily translate into tickets bought.”
The tracking backs her up.
There is an audience for Coyote vs. Acme. It has been sitting in the low 40s since July, and it is loud enough online to have kept the movie alive after Warner Bros. Discovery buried it.
What the last seven weeks show is that it never got any bigger. Not on a perfect score, not on the press cycle that followed, not on a release date finally arriving.
Which makes this weekend’s box office the real test, and a narrow one: How many of the people who were already there actually buy a ticket?
If they show up, Warner Bros. Discovery still has to explain why it wrote off a movie that opened anyway.
If they don’t, WBD gets retroactive cover for the worst decision in its history, and Hollywood goes back to blaming the fans for a number it spent three years creating.
Coyote vs. Acme opens August 28, directed by Dave Green and starring Will Forte, John Cena and Lana Condor, with James Gunn among the producers.
For the full board, see our summer tracking roundup.
