Wrath

Yeah, I did some envelope math, and I suspect there are three players all relatively close to the top and within my likely margin of error. I'm somewhat curious to see how the ordering sorted out.

I will say that I can understand wanting a break after the Tele-DamienRoc one. That was epic.

Well, yes and no. The preseason is a *ton* of points. But its relatively rare for one person to get *everything* right and the same number of points are available to everyone. So, yes, if you crash and burn on the pre-season, you're pretty much screwed. However, if you do well, the odds are good that other people will also do well, and everyone's ups and downs have a habit of cancelling each other out. As a result, its not at all uncommon for even the top spots to only be a few thousand points apart. Putting it another way, yes, the preseason is ton of points, and Tele doing great at it and DamienRoc doing poorly allowed Tele to *almost* make up a gigantic lead. Yet DamienRoc ended up beating Tele by basically a single week's worth of weekly questions. There are a bunch of people playing (and usually even more during the summer), so while, say, 20k seems like a trivial amount of points out of 2-3 million, the odds that *someone* ends up within 20k points of you at the end of the game is actually pretty good and you'll really wish you had them.

No, it cannot. I'm afraid you're wrong about this.

Eddie the Eagle 9.1M Gods of Egypt 11.5M Triple Nine 9.9M

Absolutely. The non-Euclidean math required to get him there isn't going to solve itself!

Heh, I was just thinking the same thing. I never saw Cloverfield when it came out.

One of our least noteworthy weeks of predicting. We didn't do well, but we didn't do terrible, either in aggregate or on any particular movie. It was the early September of movie predicts. Race Prediction: 12.1M +/- 4.72M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 7.4M (off by 4.7M, so 0.99 stndev) Not great but not awful. We were the most optimistic and the movie came in a little low. Best predict was mahnamahna at 8. Risen Prediction: 16.5M +/- 4.62M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 11.8M (off by 4.7M, so 1.03 stndev) Not great but not awful. We were *really* optimistic so while it beat everyone else's expectations, it still came in well below ours. Best predict was CoolEric258 with our low predict at 12M. The Witch Prediction: 6.5M +/- 2.42M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 8.8M (off by 2.3M, so 0.96 stndev) Not great but not awful. Seems a little repetitive, but when we miss all three new openers by between 0.96 and 1.03 stndev, the comments are all going to sound pretty similar, although the circumstances for all 3 were quite different. This time we were pretty much in the middle of the pack, maybe slightly low, and the movie came in slightly above expectations. BourneFan#1 had the best predict at 8.6M.

Oh, I noticed. Better late than never.

Won by 0.27. Nice!

Ok, Im not liking that sotm14 post..

Here we go...

Hmm. Feels like Eddie is getting the most buzz (Mrs Wrath is excited for it. I wonder if its that she's figured out that Eggsy from Kingsmen is playing Eddie), but its only in 2,000 theaters (according to BOM.com, anyway). Gods of Egypt feels like it almost has negative buzz, if that's possible, and I suppose Triple Nine is somewhere in the middle. But, of course, its still Deadpool's world and we're all just living in it. Please provide your 2/22-24 Opening Weekend predicts for, Eddie the Eagle Gods of Egypt Triple Nine Deadline is now going to be sometime between midnight Wednesday and Thursday midmorning (US Eastern time), depending on when I get to it.

She thought it was awesome and hilarious, but slightly traumatizing. I think she'd have preferred to not see the pegging scene at all, but seeing it with her dad was doubly bad. 95% of the movie she loved, though.

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. I'd love for the Warcraft movie to be successful (which I think is 50/50, at best), but I can think of nothing worse than computer games being the new trend in movies.

Um, no, we don't. And I say this as someone who has played a lot of video games and was a serious Warcraft raider for years. I can think of few things that would be worse. You know how people sometimes damn things with faint praise, by saying its "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"? Well, this would be worse than getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

If it doesnt happen in 2016, it'll happen soon.

That was such a great movie. I need to go see it again.

As one of the lucky ones who got into Deadpool, I have to agree with GG above. The biggest imbalance in the game post-Deadpool isn't the risk of me crowding everyone out of the good movies, its that I've got flexibility. I mean, BvS is next week and it'll take 600M to fill. lucasbenica and I don't have even close to that much money added together. Even if we worked together we couldn't crowd everyone else out of BvS. I'm not hoping to crowd everyone else out, I'm afraid that I'll (again) be slow on the draw, forget that it happens to be BvS buy-in night, and everyone else will crowd out *me*. Sure, that can happen to anyone too, but its a bigger deal for me because I can more thoroughly take advantage of it than most other folks in the game. In fact, if you watch my buying you'll see that I'm aggressively buying other stuff rather than saving up cash *because* I'm not totally confident I'll be on the ball enough to buy into BvS. Expanding the window likes that probably helps me more than it helps anyone else in the game (except lucasbenica, obviously), because it *expands* my flexibility advantage. I'm personally kinda risk-averse, as my "never met a question I couldn't abstain from" approach to the Winter game attests. So one solution that occurs to me (and I'm certain its occurred to CJohn), is to call the game early, give lucasbenica and I joint victories, and then start it over again. There's a ton of logistical problems with this and I doubt most folks would be interested, but I'm always happy to take money off the table and call it a day so I figured I'd throw it out there. Another possibility occurs to me. The fundamental flaw of the game is that if someone builds up a big lead, its kinda hard to catch up. Sure, you can pick better movies than them, but there aren't *that* many movies (this time of year, anyway) that are good bets to hit home runs. If you have $200M to work with, and another person has $300M, you'll make smart choices to catch up. Except the person with $300M will probably make all those same choices *and* pick up a couple gambles on the side that will probably end up being a net gain over the course of the game. Its hard to catch someone with a lead. Anyway, the idea, and as a forewarning, it would cause some changes and might (or might not) be difficult to track (which would be a deal-breaker, imo), would be to change how investments are handled. Investing is handled the same as now, but when your movie makes money, you can only earn back as much as you initially invested. Anything a movie makes over that amount is skimmed off the top and counted as "Victory money". So, lets say you invest $10M in Z2, and your share of it eventually makes $12M. How it would work is that you'd gradually get your $10M back to invest in other movies, and then you'd also get $2M, your profit off the movie, in "Victory dollars". At the end of the game, the winner is the person who has the most Victory dollars. This would change some things. People would be a *lot* more careful about investing in movies, because investing in a money loser would really sting. Maybe you could withdraw your Victory dollars from the bank, but only enough to get you back to $100M. Also, since the total amount people have to invest wouldn't really go up, people would be much more strategic about their investments. Filling up BvS would take a serious chunk of the total investment dollars in the game, leaving much less competition for the Witches and Cloverfields of the world. People would have to make serious strategic decisions about what to invest in. All movies could probably max out at 100%, or maybe 150% for Blockbusters, just because there'd be far fewer dollars floating around. Also, there would be far less "snowballing your way to victory". If you picked out a breakout-hit, you'd get your cash back faster to invest in other movies and you'd rack up a bunch of Victory dollars. But you wouldn't suddenly have $200M to invest when everyone else has $100M, so you'd have less of an on-going advantage. If someone ends up losing all, or virtually all of their money, restarting at $100M would be a *lot* more useful than it is now (since you wouldn't be behind at all in investing capacity, and thus ability to make money. In fact, you'd have *more* cash to invest right away than anyone else since you wouldn't have money tied up in things already). However, the tradeoff is that you'd have to give up all your Victory dollars to do it, meaning there are more significant long-term consequences to starting over. Anyway, just thought I'd toss that out as an idea.

Not that I'm pointing fingers or anything, but you are responsible for me going 100% in on Risen in Fantasy Box Office. /glares at WrathofHan

How exactly does that work? Reverse order of the last season's final standings like the NBA? If I knew that was the case, I'd have tanked this season to get a shot at BvS!

What? You're missing out! I do it for the glory and for the right to loot and pillage through the local towns if I come in 4th! At least, that's how Bozley explained it to me.

But the problem is that "initial" projections are all over the place from a time standpoint. For TFA, "initial" projections were from like September/October. With Deadpool, the "initial" projections were from, oh, the Friday before open, and JW was somewhere in the middle.

Also, I tweeted it from BOTFPredictor, not that anyone saw it. One day.

Well, I certainly hope that everyone understood that when I wrote that we were "optimistic" about Deadpool, I was clearly misspelling "massively underpredicting". I don't think that'll be the case this week, but last week certainly shows that you never know. I will say the odds of a break-out success seem more limited this week, though The Witch is getting some good buzz. The other predictors are nicely back in order this week, and in fact 5 other folks thoughtfully put out predicts in a timely manner. ShowBuzzDaily seems pretty reliable as long as we're looking for 3-day predicts, and MovieWeb seems to come and go, but is present this week. Overall, we're a little optimistic on Race, very optimistic on Risen, and right in the middle of the pack on The Witch. In a pleasant surprise, ratios are huge on Race and The Witch so even if we're wrong, we can at least say that we weren't entirely confident in our guesses. As usual, I went through the various predicts (12 for everything) and here's what we ended up with: Race Mean: 12.1M Median: 11.55M StnDev: 4.72M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 39.16% High: 20M Low: 5M BO.com 8.3M Deadline 10M MovieWeb 10M ShowBuzzDaily 9M Variety 9M Risen Mean: 16.5M Median: 14.4M StnDev: 4.62M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 27.92% High: 25.5M Low: 12M BO.com 8.5M Deadline 10M MovieWeb 11.5M ShowBuzzDaily 9.5M Variety 10M The Witch Mean: 6.5M Median: 6.7M StnDev: 2.42M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 37.45% High: 10.7M Low: 1.7M BO.com 7M Deadline 5.5M MovieWeb 7.5M ShowBuzzDaily 6.5M Variety 10M