M-O-N-E-Y! : Gee, a Keen Analyst Might Be Able to Spot a Trend

“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is rapidly nearing the magical $100-million mark at the box office, spurred on by kids and teens who are going back to see it a second or third time.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger action film had sold about 13 million tickets across the nation, translating to $61.7 million in its first seven days of release.

By tonight, “Terminator 2” is expected to be comfortably past $90 million and is expected to top $100 million by Tuesday, according to estimates by Bill Soady, executive vice president of distribution for Tri-Star Pictures.

“I’ve talked with exhibitors who get the pulse of the audience and they’re telling me that we’re getting kids and teens coming back.” If so, that would be the kind of repeat business that propelled such movies as “Batman” and “Home Alone” into the box-office stratosphere.

But there are questions among some in the exhibition business about how long “Terminator 2” can sustain the fierce pace, especially when the movie is drawing an unusually high number of adults--about half. It’s mostly the teens and children who will see it again.

Another concern is how it fares with the female audience. Schwarzenegger action-movie audiences are usually 25% to 30% female. And some polls, including the four-state Cinemascore survey of moviegoers, show similar results this time, although Tri-Star’s own polls put the female share of the audience much higher.

Meanwhile, the original 1984 sleeper “The Terminator” has sprung to life on home video thanks to the record-breaking “T2.”

Hemdale Home Video, in anticipation of fans eager to own their own “Terminator,” repackaged the video title in glitzy metallic colors and released it two weeks ago at a low sell-through price. “Sales are booming so fast we can’t even keep up with our inventory,” Hemdale’s Jay Catlin said. “It’s selling like a new title. We’ve sold almost 200,000 units to distributors. There’s just a real ‘Terminator’ craze right now.”

The New York-based Alexander & Associates reports that over a four-year period, dating back to 1987 (the year the company began tracking national video rentals), “Terminator” rented about 16 million times. But in just the last three months, ever since the marketing onslaught for the sequel began, “Terminator” has been rented 3.3 million times.

“That’s a lot,” Alexander’s Amy Innerfield said. “The last few weeks has been the bulk of the activity. Within the next month, I would not be surprised if it jumped up into the Top 20 titles. It’s a trend we always find--once a movie’s sequel is released theatrically, the movie original pops out of the blue on video.”

Chances are, many people lining up to see “Terminator 2” never even saw “The Terminator” in theaters. The sequel took in $52.3 million in its first five days of release; the original, which took in $38.4 million for its entire run, acquired its large following during the mid-1980s.