One Year To Go: Dawn Treader’s Competition

We are officially one year away from the USA release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader! Yay! In honor of hitting the 365-days-to-go mark, we thought we’d take a look at Dawn Treader‘s competition next year.

As everybody knows, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will probably make or break the rest of the Narnia film series due to Prince Caspian not performing as well as the production had hoped and budgeted for. If Dawn Treader does well, the series will continue; if not, the production may call it quits.

After Prince Caspian only made half of its predicted box office profit, most people blamed its summer release date and the tough competition surrounding it (like Iron Man and Indiana Jones). Even though Dawn Treader is back to a Christmas release, it will still face some competition. Here’s what we’re looking at:

November 19, 2010 — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (three weeks prior to Dawn Treader)
Love it or hate it, everybody knows that the Harry Potter series has grown into monster franchise. In fact, it is one of the most profitable movie franchises in the world (unadjusted, it’s number one worldwide). There is no doubt this movie will do well at the box office as the series is drawing to a close. Of course the big question for Narnia fans everywhere is will this movie affect Dawn Treader‘s box office? Most movies will have one, maybe two, large grossing weekends. The Harry Potter movies are no exception. By the time week three rolls around it shouldn’t affect Dawn Treader‘s opening weekend. Remember too that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came out three weeks after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

November 24, 2010 — Rapunzel 3-D (the Thanksgiving release two and a half weeks prior to Dawn Treader)
This is Disney’s next big animated movie they’ve been hyping for the past year or two. (I heard about this movie long before The Princess and the Frog that comes out tomorrow.) Rapunzel”s big selling point is its new style of animation. It’s a 3-D movie, but with the old hand-painted animation look. Will it affect Dawn Treader? Well, unless its story ends up being on par with Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin, I think Harry Potter is going to swallow this movie whole.

December 10, 2010 — The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
In the words of Doug Gresham, go see it with your friends, take your friends’ friends, and take your enemies because you’re supposed to love them too. Hopefully this movie will be a huge success!

December 17, 2010 – Tron: Legacy (one week after Dawn Treader)
When Tron came out in 1982, it was much like Star Wars with its groundbreaking special effects. Nobody had seen anything like it before. Though it certainly wasn’t as popular as Star Wars, the original Tron has a significant group of hard-core followers. Series reboots are “in” right now, with a lot of movies from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s being remade with mixed results. The good ones (like Batman Begins and Star Trek) are making huge profits. It remains to be seen whether or not Tron will fall into this category, but I think its real threat to Dawn Treader is the fact it releases only one week later. It could go either way… King Kong failed to bring down The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but Indiana Jones did much better than Prince Caspian.

December 22, 2010 — The Green Hornet (the Christmas release one and a half weeks after Dawn Treader)
This may be the dark horse of the Holiday 2010 movie season. Actor Seth Rogan’s adaptation is based on the ’40s radio show and the later ’60s TV show about a masked superhero called the Green Hornet. Not much is known about this movie yet, aside from the fact that Rogan has stated it will be an old-fashioned-type superhero movie. This movie will be opening the same day as Jack Black’s Gulliver’s Travels, which will definitely help out Dawn Treader as The Green Hornet will have direct competition for its opening day release. Time will tell if it will be a serious contender with Dawn Treader.

In conclusion, when we compare this line-up to what the two previous Narnia movies had to face, this is about as good of a schedule as we could hope for. None of these films really seems to offer serious competition (provided that Dawn Treader is a good movie that everybody wants to go see). However, keep in mind that all of these release dates are subject to change, and more studios may squeeze their movies in around this time as well.