The midnight screenings of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug generated roughly $8.8 million last night–that’s more than $4 million less than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey made at similar screenings last year.That tracks with what expectations analysts already had for the film–Box Office Mojo wrote that while the first movie made around $80 million in its opening weekend, the second is tracking between $70 and $75 million.Conventional wisdom in today’s movie market is that sequels do better because they’re given the opportunity to build on the success of the film that came immediately before them, but movies like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse proved that sometimes, the penultimate chapter just doesn’t live up to the hype. In both cases, those movies took a steep step down from their predecessors on opening weekend but went on to gross respectable numbers, and then the next chapter in the series finished strong.
