Wrath

TFA had the second lowest mult of any SW movie. Of course, that's mostly because of when they came out rather than their innate SW-ness. But TFA really was impressively leggy. I'm guessing 3.1-3.2 for R1, but I'm curious to see if that's right.

Bye Bye Man - 40%

Ok, I'm probably an idiot. But I think this might be funny. Maybe I'm just a big fan of Alec Baldwin.

166.65m OW 519.31 DOM 1245.1 WW 73.14 OD

Already been done, though.

No problem. Changing predicts is totally fine as long as its before the deadline. And... yeah, I thought CB had a little bit of buzz building for it. Now it kinda has "crater" written all over it.

You know what happened this week? I didn't look at anyone else's results, just did some math and put in what I thought would happen. 5th is better than tying for 19th. I'm still certain my original strategy was correct, I'm just going to assume I'm too bad at cheating to pull it off.

Huh. Just realized that I've now been closest on 3 in a row. C'mon folks, come knock me down!

Miss Sloane Prediction: 2.044M +/-0.94M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 1.845M (off by 0.2M, so 0.21 stndev) Nice job! Darn good predict! Nice to be able to say that two weeks in a row. And we were the second best predict after BO.com (who predicted a flat 2M. No one else was close). Best predict was by me at 1.8M. Office Christmas Party Prediction: 15M +/-2.74M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 16.89M (off by 1.89M, so 0.69 stndev) Not great, but not bad either and is much better than the 1.0 threshold for being a "good" predict (lower is better). Best predict was me again at 16.5M.

This will continue to make things right. In a way its a shame. A pair of other well regarded movies are either opening or going wide this weekend and they deserve a better fate than box-office road kill. Not that they'll necessarily do badly on their own terms, and it'll be interesting to see how well they do as counter programming. But for purposes of opening weekend box office, this weekend is all about Star Wars. Here we go. Please provide your 11/16 - 11/18 Opening Weekend predicts for, Collateral Damage Manchester by the Sea (wide) Rogue One Deadline this week will be Thursday afternoon (US Eastern time), whenever I get to it. Note that we will be using our median predict rather than our mean predict going forward.

Frasier deserves to be in the discussion as well. Especially the early seasons with the Niles/Daphne tension. 30 Rock, too. Also, its not on the same level but Moonlighting was really, really good for a while. A young Bruce Willis had tons of charisma and the chemistry with Sheppard was great. Really creative, too, like the episode done entirely in iambic pentameter. Thinking back, it had some early, primitive aspects of the meta-playfulness of Community.

Alright, two weeks in a row and still on track. Just in time for next week when everyone will care again ;). For the time being, things are still quiet. 10 predicts for OCP and 6 for Miss Sloane. Miss Sloan (wide) Mean: 2.2M Median: 2.044M StnDev: 0.94M (revised StnDev: 0.94M) Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 45.97% High: 4M Low: 1.5M BO.com 2M Deadline 3.7M MovieWeb 3.8M ShowBuzzDaily Variety 5M Office Christmas Party Mean: 15.8M Median: 15M StnDev: 2.74M (revised StnDev: 2.74M) Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 18.26% High: 21M Low: 12M BO.com 17M Deadline 14M MovieWeb 13.8M ShowBuzzDaily Variety 14M

Yeah. Without getting into spoilers, I'll say that I liked the overall structure of the story but I didn't really like the ending that much.

Well, probably, just because Rogue One will pull screens from everything. But they're two *really* different movies and I doubt there's much direct competition between them. Plus, it'll be Arrival's 5th weekend so Rogue One shouldn't hurt its total that badly. Its kinda wacky that any significant amount of its domestic take is still at risk. Edit - I feel like I'm going to get rocks thrown at me, but I only thought it was good, rather than great. Adams was terrific, and I thought the pacing was perfect, its just that... I felt like it was a little too sure of its own massive importance.

I know its the holidays and all, but even so I can't imagine even great WoM giving it legs like that with the slate of new openers about to hit.

1. Predict Rogue One's OW as a percentage of The Force Awakens' OW. 61% 2. Predict Rogue One's Domestic Total as a percentage of The Force Awakens' Domestic Total. 55% 3. Predict Rogue One's WW total as a percentage of The Force Awakens' WW total. 59% 4. Predict Rogue One's Korean Gross as a percentage of The Force Awakens' Korean Gross. 55% 5. Predict Rogue One's Christmas Day gross as a percentage of The Force Awakens' Christmas Day gross. 48%

1. Will Office Christmas Party open to more than $15m? *YES* 2. Will Office Christmas Party open to more than $17.5m? 3000 *NO* 3. Will Office Christmas Party open to more than $20m? *NO* 4. Will The Bounce Back open to more than $4M? *NO* 5. Will The Bounce Back open to more than $6M? 2000 *NO* 6. Will Miss Sloane make more than $6M for the weekend? *NO* 7. Will Miss Sloane make more than $8.5M for the weekend? *NO* 8. Will La La Land have a PTA above $40,000? *YES* 9. Will La La Land have a PTA above $55,000? 2000 *YES* 10. Will Moana stay at number one this weekend? *YES* 11. Will Fantastic Beasts remain in the top 3 this weekend? *YES* 12. Will Arrival cross $80M domestic by the end of the weekend? *YES* 13. Will Manchester by the Sea enter the top 10? 3000 *YES* 14. Will Allied stay above Dr Strange? *YES* 15. Will a Christmas film increase more than 200% on Friday? *YES* 16. Will any film drop more than 42.5% on Sunday? 2000 *YES* 17. Will Trolls increase more than 125% on Saturday? *NO* 18. Will Rules Don't apply have a bigger percentage drop than Bleed for this? 3000 *YES* 19. Will Trolls make more than $2.5M this weekend? *YES* 20. Will this this weekend make up for the void which is the release schedule for the rest of the year? *Nope. Didn't even make up for last weekend." Bonus: 14/20 2000 15/20 3000 16/20 5000 17/20 7000 18/20 10000 19/20 14000 20/20 20000 Part 2: Closest predictor wins 5000 points (Added bonus: If prediction is within 10% win 6000; 5% 7000; 2.5% 9000; 1% 12000) 1. Predict Almost Christmas Weekend Gross 17.1M 2. Predict Miss Sloane's percentage increase 4287% 3. What will La La Land's PTA be? 56,500 Part 3: Predict the films that place in the following positions: 1. Moana 3. Fantastic Beasts 6. Dr Strange 9. Hacksaw Ridge 12. Almost Christmas 14. Loving

Well, you know how the young can be when they get excited prematurely...

Oh, I think there's time for plenty of assailing.

Amityville - 60%

God damn it! So, for over a year I did the weekly BOT User Predictions thing where I'd get people's projections for each weeks' new openers. I'd then compare the predictions to the actuals and then track how everyone did in absolute terms and then relative to each other as well as other places I could find predictions (BO.com, Deadline, etc). I took a break for a bit, but its back up and running again. Anyway, one of the main things I got out of it was that while some predictors are arguably better than others, no one with a decent sized body of predicts was as good as our collective wisdom. No matter how you looked at it, over time, the mean of our predictions was significantly more accurate than any of us. And our median was slightly better than our mean (and this is over probably a couple hundred movies of all sizes). So, my strategy with the weeklies was going to be to wait as long as I feasibly could (which might not be very long, but still) and then take the most popular answers from other folks, basically replicating the median answer when you've only got 2 options. Give how well it performed with the predictions, I thought it was a pretty clever strategy. And now, 7 weeks into the competition, its getting me absolutely slaughtered. I have no idea how I'm giving what I calculated to be the most common answers to various questions and then doing dramatically worse than the pack, but that seems to somehow be how its working out.

Miss Sloane - 1.8M Office Christmas Party - 16.5M

Incarnate Prediction: 2.5M +/-0.71M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 2.66M (off by 0.2M, so 0.23 stndev) Nice job! Darn good predict! And we tied with BO.com for the best predict among the sites, too. Clearly the long layoff was put to good analytical use. Closest predict was me at 2.8M.

And with this week, THINGS JUST GOT one week closer to being real. At least its better than last week. That was kind of silly. Please provide your 11/7 - 11/9 Opening Weekend predicts for, Miss Sloane (wide) Office Christmas Party Deadline this week will be Thursday afternoon (US Eastern time), whenever I get to it. Note that we will be using our median predict rather than our mean predict going forward.

Back up and running. 7 total predicts, which is about what you'd expect for a weekend almost completely void of new releases. 28.42% Ratio (which is the ratio between our median predict and the standard deviation of our predicts, its sort of a measure of how confident we are in our prediction. The lower it is, the narrower the range of our predicts, and the bigger it is, the wider that range) is pretty low for something this small, usually its more like 35-40%. Miss Peregrine was 26.71% and the ratio typically shrinks as the expected BO rises (Suicide Squad, for example was 12.44%). Incarnate Mean: 2.4M Median: 2.5M StnDev: 0.71M (revised StnDev: 0.71M) Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 28.42% High: 3.2M Low: 1.3M BO.com 2.5M Deadline 4M MovieWeb 1.6M ShowBuzzDaily Variety 4.5M