On Tuesday Leicester Square had the One Direction experience that has gone global in less than three years. At 1pm there were signs up at Leicester Square tube station saying that the entire area was full to capacity I’ve never seen signs up like that for any other premiere that has been held in Leicester Square.
In the 24 hours of the This Is Us premiere in Leicester Square 3.6million tweets were sent talking about One Direction and the premiere. The hashtag #1DMoviePremiere received 1.9million tweets. I sent a few myself more out of amazement that the scale of the premiere wasn’t seemingly seen by Sony Pictures who described the premiere to Alice Vincent at the Daily Telegraph as a standard red carpet premiere. But there was nothing standard or normal about this premiere.
As normal with many premieres fans camped out for days before into the Square to get a prime spot behind the barriers and get those wristbands that would give them that chance to be within touching distance to their idols.
Questions are now being asked about how it will do at the box office, for all the hype these kinds of films receive like Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never, Glee The 3D Concert Movie and Katy Perry’s Part of Me both had huge hype surrounding them but none were that successful at the box office. The only one that was a real success was Michael Jackson’s This Is It released in 2009 which is the film box office experts are comparing 1D’s This Is Us against but you cannot compare the two when This Is It was released in 2009 the fan base for Michael Jackson was much lower than it was in his prime in the 80’s when he could do no wrong and his album Bad was selling millions around the globe.
I believe that One Direction This Is Us could be this century’s Titanic with One Direction fans watching the film time after time as Leonardo DiCaprio’s fans did with Titanic in 1997/8 and there are far more obsessive One Direction fans out there than Leo fans.
Bookmakers Ladbrokes are offering 4/1 odds on #1DThisIsUs surpassing Skyfall’s £102m UK box office haul which box office experts are laughing at. But how on earth did Skyfall take £102 million at the UK box office no one could of ever predicted that, with the last couple of Bond’s taking less than half of that. When I saw Skyfall before it was released I really enjoyed it, thought it was the best Bond film I’ve seen in years, but on reflection watching all the other James Bon films on Sky 007 it’s not as great as I thought it was.
I believe that One Direction This Is Us will open in the UK with a James Bond style opening the only thing working against it is that the school holiday’s finish next weekend, maybe it was done on purpose like that so fans can go back to school raving about the film and more will go and see it. But do think that it would of been best released today to give it a good 10+ day run before schools reopen.
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- One Direction attend This Is Us world premiere in Leicester Square (telegraph.co.uk)
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- One Direction literally stop traffic as millions and billions of children cram into London’s Leicester Square (mirror.co.uk)
- One Direction fans turn Leicester Square into makeshift campsite as 70,000 are expected to invade for world premiere of boyband’s first movie (dailymail.co.uk)
