*At least, not as well as people expect it to. For now.

Currently, Watchmen has made $171, 988, 644 (USD) worldwide. That number doesn’t mean much in and of itself, especially if (like me) you don’t really follow how much each individual movie makes in the box office. From that number alone, it’s hard to tell if Watchmen is doing well, so, let’s do some comparing. It also seems unfair to pit Watchmen’s earnings against a movie that has already gone through a full box-office cycle, so let’s just compare opening weekend sales. I think Spider-Man 3 is a good movie to compare Watchmen to: to the general public (by far the majority of movie-goers), Watchmen is just another superhero and/or comic book movie like Spider-Man 3.

Watchmen’s Opening Weekend: $55, 214, 334

Spider-Man 3’s Opening Weekend: $151, 116, 516

So now we have a fair comparison, and we can say that Watchmen isn’t really doing that well. It’s a shame, since I think Watchmen is an awesome movie. The difference in sales figures between Watchmen and Spider-Man 3 (a worse movie in my opinion, and Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me) opens up an interesting question: why did Spider-Man 3 do better than Watchmen? That’s what I’m going to be talking about.

First of all: Watchmen has no bankable stars. Don’t get me wrong – I thought that Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode all gave phenomenal performances, but not a lot of people (myself included, pre-Watchmen PR announcements) have heard of them. My dad sees Nicholas Cage movies because Nicholas Cage is in them, and so do most of the movie-going world (insert your favourite A-grade box-office-smash actor). No Nicholas Cage in Watchmen means my dad (and the rest of the majority of the public) won’t see Watchmen.

Argument number 2 supporting my theory that Watchmen won’t make a lot of money: the trailers don’t give anything away. Most of the time, I would consider this to be a good thing – sometimes, trailers spoil for me the excitement of experiencing a movie wholly from start to finish. In this case, I think that more details were needed. We’re talking about a movie starring a team of superheroes that “no-one” (we’re still talking about the general public here) has ever heard of! How do you publicise a movie featuring characters no-one has heard of? Really push the plot, and make it really appealing. Again, I thought the movie rawked, but the trailer doesn’t really make a lot of people want to see the film. It’s just not a “this summer” trailer, which is what a lot of people see movies based on, unfortunately. However, I do really like the second trailer for the film, and wish that it had been the one that was pushed.

So Watchmen is a movie with no bankable stars, whose plot and characters are a mystery to by far the majority of people. What does this mean? It means that Watchmen shouldn’t be compared to movies like Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and all of the other superhero and/or comic book adaptations that it’s being compared to. In all of the movies I just mentioned, the characters and plot are more obvious, not least of all because a lot more people had much more in-depth experiences with those franchises when they were young. That explains the first amendment to the title of this post: why Watchmen won’t do as well as people expect – it’s because people are putting Watchmen on the wrong platform, comparing it with movies that aren’t on the same level. Whether or not the movies Watchmen is being compared with are better or worse are a different matter.

The second part of the asterisk note was that Watchmen won’t do well for now. This one’s pretty simple to address – this is a geek movie. Geeks buy lots of stuff. They will buy this movie on Blu-ray, because it’s that kind of movie. Geeks (myself firmly included) love directors’ commentaries, they love bonus features, and they love it when subplots that were left out of the film get made into their own supplementary film. Watchmen was made to be released for Blu-ray. The gorgeous visuals from the film are just begging to be seen at 1080p. This movie-being-very-profitable-in-the-home-market-after-not-doing-so-well-in-theaters thing has happened countless times before – Jersey Girl did it, Joss Whedon’s Serenity did it, it brought Futurama back and it brought Family Guy back. I will certainly be doing my part by buying Watchmen on Blu-ray when it comes out. As an aside, it’ll be interesting how well Watchmen does on Blu-ray as opposed to DVD – it’s a known fact that Blu-ray is far from taking off, but I think that the Watchmen crowd and the kind of people who appreciate the quality of Blu-ray have a lot of overlap. Could Watchmen be to Blu-ray what The Matrix was to DVD?

Sorry to pull the ol’ switcheroo there – I started out by comparing two movies, talked about the reason for the gargantuan difference that arose from that comparison, and then told you that the comparison was worth null. I kind of built up a sand castle only to push it over. Go see Watchmen.