Ant-Man will make about 60-65 million this weekend.
I know this. It hasn't happened yet. The numbers will be released today and I'm pretty sure it will verify this estimate. I'm not excited for the film. I'm sure it's fine. Marvel serves their Disney overlords very well. Marvel's softest release was the first Captain America at around 62 million.
When I was a kid my favorite movies were Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, Goonies, Lethal Weapon and the like. The thing those films have in common is that they are about friends joining and adventuring, so to speak. That's what I got from them anyway. I couldn't get enough of the stories where the band gets together and stops the bad guys (my G.I. Joe collection was ridiculous-1 Cobra for every 20 Joes. I was a bloodbath).
I would go to the aisle at the grocery store and turn to the back of Entertainment Weekly magazine to see how much money my favorite movies made at the box office. I started doing this when I was 10. The reasoning was that if they made a lot of money, they would get sequels or more films like them. The boxoffice numbers usually were in the last four pages if I remember correctly. I think page 96.
I checked this religiously. I wasn't just wanting to see if the films were just derivative of my tastes: I was observing whether society valued things that I valued outside of my small southern Oklahoma town. I wanted to know if there were people like me, people that cared about what I cared about enough and they would put their hard-earned cash down to prove it.
I guess I was lonely. Someone told me once that I was a New York Jew born in the wrong part of the world.
I love movies. I still check the boxoffice results every week. I used to be able to tell you the domestic gross for almost any film 2 years prior to being asked. It was easier in the 80's and early 90's when only 250-350 movies came out a year. Now all the major studios together put out around 1000 movies. I read the reviews and research the productions. I memorize the directors name and previous films. I check who writes the screenplays (if there are a lot of writers on a single screenplay, it can mean a bunch of rewrites and doesn't always make the best story).
It's a way I try to connect to different worlds. Bigger worlds. I need to know that there is a world out there that I fit into, even if it isn't real.