The towering level of pre-awareness, underpinned by the desire to see the sins of the prequels rectified, has been the key factor.
Part of the problem is the ubiquity of "pre-awareness" titles, those adapted from comic books, video games, and young-adult novels.
The top-ten-grossing movies of the last decade were all "pre-awareness" titles: movies like "Spider-Man" whose stories the audience already knew from another medium, or sequels.
Yet stars continue to be vital to the small subset of movies that lack pre-awareness, many of which are comedies; Stiller is one of the last of this breed.
The play's time scheme is confusing: Brown seems to have a strange pre-awareness of his rash dismissal of a female voter as a bigot during the 2010 campaign.
Having passed Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor on the scorecard, with a strong overseas showing (60.7%) for a character with almost zero pre-awareness, and the company's thriftiest (if you can call $130m thrifty) effort so far, Ant-Man is now a certified success.
The story itself is entirely original (no "pre-awareness") and runs counter to almost all other Hollywood wisdom: its period; its hero, an archaeologist with intimacy issues; its references to forgotten serials (another no-no); and its being both a globetrotting action film and a comedy (feathered fish).
Although not specifically articulated in Dormant's model, if awareness is stage 1, there could essentially be a stage 0, that is, a pre-awareness stage.
One mark of leadership is pre-awareness of problems when the signals are "soft".
In China, the movie benefited from a release over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday and a near-simultaneous dating with its U.S. debut, not to mention strong pre-awareness because the video game is very popular in China.
To hear it from Bruss, who also functions of president of Funny or Die's commercial production arm Gifted Youth, the idea was to seize on the popularity of the original "Anchorman" — a modest hit upon its release that found a cultish popularity on DVD and cable — and drive pre-awareness for the sequel without using any footage from the film.
