‘Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness’ Kick-Starts Summer Box Office With $187M
RelishMix notes that coming off of the Super Bowl on Feb. 13, the Doctor Strange 2 trailer grabbed the most viewership online in the 24 hours after the game with 93.1M social views besting Jurassic World Dominion (86.8M views) and upcoming Prime Video series Lord of the Rings (80.3M views).
Also, according to RelishMix, most of the cast for the sequel was non-social, which is unusual for a Marvel movie, i.e. Cumberbatch, Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rachel McAdams. Benedict Wong does have 692K followers on Instagram, and Cumberbatch has a super fan page with 2M followers with posts from premieres, marketing materials and behind-the-scenes.
“MCU super fans are pulling time code from trailers and deep diving for breadcrumbs — with mentions from Logan, Wolverine and back over to Spider-Man,” observes RelishMix about the pre-weekend buzz for the film which has fans obsessing over the character cameos.
The sequel’s reach across all social media platforms stood near 785M, 18% above Superhero norms with solid YouTube engagement at 461.7M views on a stack of 18 videos and 58.9M views on Facebook. TikTok views on official channels are at 8.2M while Cumberbatch related fan posts were at 36.1M views, most of which were Doctor Strange 2 related. Notably, the campaign has a hard push on Twitter views for the film at 49.6M views on trailer clips. For comparison to recent box office sensation Spider-Man: No Way Home which opened at $260M, with exceptionally well clocking 1.2B SMU social reach. The historical data on Doctor Strange was at 313M back in 2016, driven by 151.3M YouTube views.
In the perfect world of cross-promotions, SNL appearance+blockbuster weekend, Cumberbatch is hosting the late night show tonight:
If you haven’t listened to Deadline’s Hero Nation podcast already, clock below. Doctor Strange 2 scribe and Loki creator Michael Waldron said that for a minute in the development of the Steven Strange part 2, the pic was positioned to go before No Way Home.
“When the release dates got swapped, that’s when it got tricky,” Waldron told Dominic and I.
“I spent the bulk of this movie thinking we’d be coming out before No Way Home and that we were going to be blowing the lid on the multiverse. When that shift in release dates happened, it was like the audience is going to be acclimated,” says the Emmy winning scribe of Rick and Morty, “Dr. Strange is going to have had experience with the multiverse and that has a knock-down effect on everything.”
