If you believe the eye-popping tracking numbers, Sony and Marvel are sitting on an unlikely hit and kickstarting a franchise with “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.”
Ninety-one percent of men younger than 25 say they are aware of the movie which opens on 3,000 screens on Friday.
Those are strong numbers for any film, but remarkable for a sequel that took in $228 million globally in 2007 and drew scorn from many critics.
And "Spirit of Vengeance" cost an estimated $75 million to make, compared to the original film's $110 million price tag.
So how did Marvel and Sony revive the franchise for a potentially lucrative encore?
They utilized a mix of finely tuned traditional advertising and hyper-aggressive social media marketing. And they brought in the directing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who have major fanboy cred.
The duo crafted the film to appeal to their young male target and they fueled early interest in the film with a special presentation at last year' Comic-Con.
But perhaps most important, they learned from their mistakes.
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"They've taken the parts of the first film that everybody liked -- and nobody liked the first film -- and built this film around it," said a rival studio executive.
The executive pointed out that the marketing campaign has used star Nicolas Cage in a carefully measured fashion.
While Cage has heavily promoted the film in Europe and appeared on last week's "Saturday Night Live," he plays a secondary role to the film's effects and imagery in U.S. TV commercials. "Nick Cage is barely in them," the exec said.
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Despite the strong advance tracking, Sony declined to talk about the marketing and is tamping down expectations.
The studio estimates the movie will open to somewhere in the low $30 million range over the four-day Presidents Day weekend, although other box office observers predict it will bring in around $35 million.
That’s still less than the first installment of the franchise, which opened to $45.4 million over the same weekend five years ago, but a good enough start given the film's lower cost and the potential for a more leggy run.
Producer Ashok Amritraj's Hyde Park Entertainment co-financed the movie and is distributing the movie internationally. He admits the first film "wasn't quite as hot as we made it," but he's bullish on the new film.
"It's been a while since the first one," he told TheWrap, "and at this point domestically and internationally, it's tracking pretty well.
He's also been impressed with the marketing campaign run by Sony and Marvel, which includes traditional tactics and all of the social networking.
