I actually thought about this, but eventually didn’t include it because I was too young to be aware of the wider world. As a nine-year-old, I certainly anticipated it more than the Star Wars sequels that came later.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really get it upon seeing it.
Some of us on seeing the title Avengers only think of the 1960s British TV series with John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg):
That’s called dodging a bullet only to get hit by another bullet months later.
I remember people buying movie tickets just to see the trailer Batman as well. There was much hype. Great poster.
Well, I would fully expect that from you.
Yeah if we are restricting ourselves to the US, GWTW beats Avengers and even Phantom Menace. Not least because movies as a medium were just a far bigger part of the culture back when there was no television let alone the Internet. And GWTW was both based off a hugely popular novel and used a fairly new technology: Technicolor, which gave audiences a visual experience unlike almost everything else.
I am not sure quite sure how much hype there really is over Endgame. The movies are hugely popular of course and I am sure this will be no exception but their frequency and essential sameness does diminish their status as a special event IMO. And I say this as someone who generally enjoys Marvel films and will definitely watch Endgame.
I’d say that’s more of a match. The Phantom Menace wasn’t continuing the story, it was backfilling. And there was as a good dose of dread mixed in. For ROJ, we really wanted to see the end of the saga.
Well done.
And one other thing about GWTW: It lived up to the hype. There were not many people in 1939/1940 who came away perplexed, asking “all that fuss, for this?”
Yeah, I’m not saying there’s no anticipation. Just, I dunno how much.
And of course youtube is not exclusively young and male, but a behavior doesn’t have to be exclusive for the measurement of it to be affected, just uneven. Certainly young men who are online a lot are both more likely to use youtube and more likely to be interested in Avenger movies.
A movie that was anticipated by equal numbers of 50-year-old women would clearly chart much lower on the “views of trailer on youtube in first 24 hours” metric.
Fellowship of the Ring wins the award in my book for “most anticipated that lived up to its anticipation”.
An instant classic.
The crowds I saw it with roared, cheered, and broke out in applause at the end in a way I’ve rarely seen.
I’ve read criticism over the years, but FotR’s theatrical version was an amazing movie that did the rarest thing; it lived up to its hype.
I think that there is little doubt that nothing comes close to the marketing pre-The Phantom Menace. You couldn’t come close to any store without seeing product ads for the movie (forget going inside–even the vending machines were TPM themed.) And all the prizes winnable in soda/snack products–I ended up with two backpacks, a pair of walkie-talkies, and a set of posters without even trying hard.
Still say there is a good case for Avengers: Endgame, being the most anticipated cliffhanger resolution in movie history. Not sure what it’s competitors would be…
The second part of the Harry Potter finale was known to all the hardcore fans, and never had as much anticipation around it, as I recall.
Same for the (completely ruined IMO) LOTR parts 2 & 3
Matrix 2 wasn’t really a cliffhanger (IMO just went back in time and made the original, that had a very satisfying ending worst)
Possibly Return of the Jedi after Empire Strikes Back (you couldn’t claim the origin Starwars was a cliffhanger)
What other examples are there?
I think your last question is appropriate, but doesn’t it sort of make the whole question pointless?
If you’re going to disqualify movies from consideration because they don’t fit some arbitrarily narrow definition of “cliffhanger resolution,” then basically there are hardly any movies to choose from. It becomes almost something of variation on a No True Scotsman argument, where every possible alternative offered is disqualified because it doesn’t hew to an unreasonably specific set of criteria.
A cliffhanger is a pretty well understood concept in popular culture (dating back to olde timey serials like Flash Gordon), doesn’t seem too arbitrary to me. Just seems its not often done in feature length films as then you are forking out for a full price ticket, you don’t want half a movie.
And this is coming from someone who’s not a huge Marvel fan. They generally entertaining enough and well made, but not comparable to “the greats” like the original Starwars trilogy.
I remember TPM and the run up to it, and that was certainly hugely anticipated. But as you note, this movie has literally been a decade in the making, with teasers and Easter eggs galore. Even though this particular movie hasn’t been on the radar that whole time, everyone knew that some movie was going to be the culmination of everything Marvel has done, and I think that unknown movie has built over those 10+ years, making this the winner IMHO. TPM was a movie (the last movie actually) I was willing and did wait in a huge ass long line to go see, but after the original trilogy ended there wasn’t a lot of solid indications that there would be another trilogy. It wasn’t really on my own radar, though I read the books and hoped for some of them to be made into a movie (sadly, they never were, even with this new trilogy). But this movie? It’s been on every fans mind…where is all this going? What’s going to happen? How is going to live, who is going to die? Who else is going to join the universe…and how? It’s all going towards this one movie…all that fan hype and hope, all the fear and expectation. This is the big one (even though, personally, I’m currently psyched for Captain Marvel…but End game is like a slow simmer on the back burner, ready to explode once we get closer…
This reminded me of seeing The Fellowship of the Ring. As the theater emptied, the woman directly ahead of me said to her date: “That ending made no sense! They’re going to have to make another movie.”
I suspect that many people are planning on seeing it when it comes out, may have watched the trailer on YouTube, and couldn’t tell you the month it’s coming out, much less the release date. That’s pretty much me, except I haven’t watched the trailer. I’ll watch it whenever it comes out but it’s not like I’m making any plans or keeping a countdown.
If you were talking about The Avengers I might agree with you, that was the culmination of everything that had come before and was something genuinely different. But outside of some small group of fans nobody has been waiting for this for ten years, this is just another marvel tent pole blockbuster, little different to Ultron or Civil war. There were other blockbusters recently, there will be another out again in about ten minutes, thats just the way it is these days.
I also think using youtube views as a measure of anticipation would be inaccurate. I mean, I have no real anticipation for this movie but I’ve still seen the trailer on youtube, it was on the homepage when I was browsing one day. Doesn’t mean a thing except that I saw a link and clicked it.
Just to point out, that the 3 Avengers movies are the 4th, 6th, & 8th highest grossing movies of all time. Black Panther is 9, for a total of 40% of the top 10 being MCU movies. No other movie franchise has more than one movie in the top 10.
In the USA, it’s similar, Black Panther is 3, Avengers & Infinity Wars are 4 & 7 (Ultron is down at 16), and Star Wars is the only other franchise with 2 or more (Force Awakens 1, Last Jedi 8).
So lets not say it’s just a “small group of fans”. More people watch MCU movies than damn near anything else.
Nm