1B for Avengers III part I and II...
That's impressive. They have built a brand, they have a lot of confidence, and they are going balls to the walls.
The only problem is this, if they do this and it fails to make 1B WW per film, they are screwed.
According to John Campea. If your film makes X dollars, you then have to take 1/3 of the total off the top and you get your total gross profit.
Then you have to add in marketing which is 35-50M per film. Lets say they spend
550M - Avengers III part I.
550M - Avengers III part II.
1.1B
Then you make 800M for Part I
and then
1,1 B for part II.
That's 1.9 B World Wide. Then you take 630M off the top for theaters.
That is a total of 1.27B Dollars. It cost 1.1B. You are making a 170M dollar profit. Which is a profit. But they are hoping for
1.5 Billion for part I
and
2 Billion for the finale Part II.
We have to factor in a few things here.
A) Civil War was essentially (for general audiences) an Avengers film. It made less than AoU, which made less than Avengers. The market is over-saturated with these Comic Book films.
B) LOGAN is like The Dark Knight rebirth. After a decade of BRIGHT, FUN, POPCORN MCU films, they want the darker, edgier approach. When TDK came out, people got tired of the dark CBMs and wanted MCU. Now, they are craving Dark again.
C) The Balloon for CBMs, IMHO was 2015. I think that was the ceiling. If AoU had been as good as Avengers, it would have topped it. Look at Jurassic World and Furious 7. Even those films outgrossed Avengers AoU. They didn't even have as much of an established Universe.
D) The "Deadpool" effect. MCU is akin to the Disney Renaissance in the 1990s. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, etc. Those animated films (at the time) were crushing the box office like no other animated films had EVER done before. Then in 2001 SHREK came out, a satire on the GENRE of Animated Fairy Tales. It crushed it due to audiences getting over-saturated with the market. The Disney Renaissance was dead, and they didn't have a hit (outside of PIXAR) untill "Tangled", nearly a decade after SHREK.
All I'm saying is, history repeats itself. I love Comic Book films, but they are on the decline, not the rise. Every genre has it's peak of the mountain, and I think that stretch between "The Dark Knight" and "Iron Man 3" was the top of the peak, after AoU, it's all going on a downward trend. I think the DCEU was about 5 years too late. They should have used TDK trilogy as a jumping point to launch their DCEU in 2013 and by now have already released MoS, WW, Flash, Aquaman, and JL. They will make money, but not the same as the Marvel CU.
People may see Avengers III part I and II if it is marketed as "The Grand Finale" to this shared universe. Kind of like RDJ and Chris Evans "One Last Time" thing, then maybe they could capture the hearts of those who have enjoyed this universe. But if it's pretty well known they are going beyond this point to the General Audiences, they won't come in droves like before.
It'll be interesting to see.