Our exclusive box-office tool crunches Watchmen's future.

Warner Bros. had huge hopes pinned on Watchmen, the much-hyped adaptation of the classic graphic novel that opened Friday to underwhelming reviews. Early box-office numbers report a solid but unheroic $55.7 million take for the film's opening weekend, which is on the lower register of analysts' $50 million to $70 million predictions.

Now a different guessing game begins: How much will Watchmen make by the time it peters out of theaters? TBM already knows the answer: Domestically, Watchmen will make a total of about $169 million. We know this because action movies with mediocre reviews historically make about 30 percent of their total gross in the opening weekend, according to our historical analysis. You can see our prediction for Watchmen plotted below among other blockbusters from the past five years.

Last week we combed through five years of data to measure whether critical reaction has any bearing on how much a blockbuster's ticket sales drop off after the opening weekend. After crunching the stats, we found that for action films there was indeed a correlation between the critics and the percentage of total gross earned in the first weekend, as our homemade box-office tool demonstrates.

What you see above are all the movies from the last five years that made more than $75 million and opened in more than 2,500 theaters. On the x-axis you'll see the film's Metacritic rating, and on the y-axis, the percentage of its total revenue reaped in the first weekend. Each film is color-coded for genre, which you can make appear and disappear by checking the genres in the upper-right of the tool. (Watchmen is the large yellow dot in the center. The values for total gross and percentage are our projections, of course.) You can also play with different metrics via the drop-down menu in the upper-left.

Using the data shown in the tool, we ran regressions on the different genres to see where the correlation was strongest. Action blockbusters were the winner, and, mathematically speaking, we can be 99 percent confident that there is a statistically significant correlation between an action blockbuster's critical reaction and its opening-weekend haul relative to its total gross. Correlation, of course, does not mean causation—critics aren't necessarily influencing the box office. But it does mean there's a relationship, coincidentally or otherwise.

Using this data, we determined that Watchmen would make 32.7 percent of its total gross in its first weekend. We've since revised that number to 32.9 percent as more reviews were added to Metacritic's database. So, combining that 32.9 percent with Watchmen's actual take its opening weekend—$55.7 million—we come up with its total projected earnings: $169 million.

That sum would place it as a modest success. Its budget is reported to be about $150 million, which the film should easily clear with global receipts and DVD revenues. But businesswise, Watchmen will be far from epic if our projections are correct. That $169 million would place it as the 137th all-time highest-grosser. It falls even further once inflation is taken into account. It even pales in comparison to the last film of its director, Zack Snyder. Snyder's 300 made $210.6 million, the top-ranking R-rated movie of 2007. We’re betting Watchmen won't get anywhere close to that.

***
You can read more about our methodology in our first article on the box-office data. Our master spreadsheet is here, and we're eager to hear about more insights and analyses. E-mail us with any findings.

One reader, a marketing professor at University of Texas at Austin named Raghunath Rao, used our data to create his own regression predicting the actual dollar amount of Watchmen's opening weekend. It turns out critical reaction can be a pretty good gauge of that stat, too. Using the data we collected and factoring in theater count, Rao's correlation put Watchmen at a $56.7 million. Only $1 million off. Who says critics don't hold sway anymore?

(Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.)