Jason

At 65/81 fresh, and assuming a final total of ~290 reviews, the 95% confidence interval is from 72% to 86%. Distribution looks like this: Bonus - comparison graph showing the distribution after 31 reviews (25 fresh, RT score 81%):

Btw, the vast majority of English-language media sources follow Asian naming conventions for Asian names, as does Wikipedia. IMDb is a notable exception in its choice to transcribe Asian names according to Western conventions.

I missed out on Keith Simanton's previous stint at BOM, wasn't following box office back then. So I only know him as they guy who predicted Sing as the winner of Best Animated Feature. It's actually hard for me to imagine anything worse than that.

Went for a whole year, this deal was too good to pass up. As an added bonus, there's something memorable about the renewal date:

I wonder why Weinstein decided to wait till April to distribute it in the US? Especially since a late February/early March release in Canada seems to be working out fine, at least anecdotally? Edit: Notably, the Canadian distributor is Entertainment One, not Weinstein.

I was a bit worried he had some special intel or something on Before I Fall being a complete bomb, but then I saw he was hedging on his bet in the Derby.

Take.

At only 31 reviews in, 95% confidence interval is enormous right now - 64% to 90%. Distribution looks like this:

But lying about your down-ballot choices makes absolutely no difference to your first choice, because they are only counted if your first choice has already been eliminated, as I've described. You absolutely cannot help or harm your first choice by the order of your down-ballot choices. This isn't just my conjecture, it's a known property of run-off voting.

It's not what misafeco was describing, and it's very rare for that type of tactical voting to be used (most people aren't aware of it), and rarer still for it to be successful. Knowing which choice to rank first instead your true first-choice requires detailed knowledge of the down-ballot preferences of the other voters, which usually isn't available and certainly not for Best Picture voting. Even then, it requires a certain number of people of people to vote tactically, if too many voters adopt the tactic it also fails.

Plurality voting is actually much more susceptible to tactical voting than run-off preferential voting. In plurality voting, someone who really has "Manchester by the Sea" or "Hell or High Water" as a favourite could vote tactically against the perceived frontrunner ("La La Land") by voting for "Moonlight", knowing that their true preference has no chance of winning. What you describe as tactical voting actually would not work. The additional choices on your ballot are only counted if your first choice has already been eliminated. So you cannot help your first choice by choosing not to vote for any of the other choices. The only way to vote tactically in run-off voting requires you to have very detailed knowledge of the ordered preferences of the other voters, which is almost never the case certainly not in Oscar voting. A frontrunner doesn't lose in preferential voting because of tactical voting, it loses because of weak second-choice support. The only reason why the outcome is "unpredictable" is because the system is new and people are still using the same predictors of the winner they used for the old system - the so-called "precursor awards". Which, as far as I'm aware, are using plurality voting. I'm not particularly fussed about who wins the Oscar either way, but in principle preferential voting is more reflective of the broad preferences of a group of voters than plurality voting, where a candidate can win because of vote-splitting between other candidates that are mutually preferred by a majority of voters.

One thing I'm sure @jandrew is aware of, but perhaps is sometimes lost in the discussion of a specific film's marketing campaign, is that the goal for a studio is to maximize profits, not revenue. So more marketing is not always better, at some point the amount of extra revenue coming into the studio from additional marketing will fall below the cost of that marketing.

Can confirm this is a surprise for me. Also @The Panda and @cannastop, great write-ups. My sorry procrastinating butt will post the one I was supposed to have submitted after the ceremony.

I thought "suffering Delphian" referred to Tele (you know, our sage from Ancient Greece, sounds about right). I'm not understanding how that actually refers to Chewy?

So better than Interstellar, then?

I just ranked the choices I felt strongly about, it didn't take me long. A truncated ballot is still better than no ballot at all?

I've finished adjusting the films in the table with the additional ticket price data. I've also added 15 additional films: Brave Cars Cars 2 Finding Dory Interstellar Man of Steel Ratatouille Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones Suicide Squad The Hunger Games The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 The Secret Life of Pets Thor: The Dark World WALL-E Wreck-It Ralph The exchange rates have been updated to be current as of February 16. Archived table from January 10 (ordered by original WW), for comparison: Adjusted OS grosses are now an average of 2.1% higher compared with January 10 exchange rates.

I don't want to re-hash something that happened earlier, or call people out personally, because it's really besides the point. The term has been used repeatedly, and not in response to character or intelligence attacks. And the first use of "backlash" that I saw was not because of an attack on anyone's character or intelligence. It was a comment on the movie only. The term "millenial entitlement" was introduced by someone describing other opinions as backlash. Not by the preceding comments describing the movie itself.

Did you compare them separately, or did you do a multiple regression? I've wanted to do something like that for a while, the main thing stopping me is that pretty much every source of data other than Box Office Mojo makes it an absolute pain in the ass to gather the data. With the possible exception of Metacritic.

Does any criticism of La La Land have to be dismissed as backlash now? I get that apparently there are people complaining about how many awards this is getting, but I'm not one of them, neither is @TalismanRing, and two out of fourteen comments in the aforementioned NY Times article mentioned the awards, and not in a way that was unfairly critical in my view. Like, if you loved La La Land so much you feel the need to defend it, great. All the power to you. Address the criticisms made in the article. Address the criticism TalismanRing made. Address the main point I made, instead of a single word where the context should have made it clear that I was using it in its more general English meaning. "Backlash" is the type of comment that preaches only to the converted. P.S. For the record, I'm happy most people loved it. I wanted to as well. In my case, I actually agree the singing or dancing didn't have to be perfect. It had more to do with the characters. I'm not sure why some of us are interpreting them so differently, or reacting so differently to a similar interpretation. I'd love that bit of insight. But it's hard to have that discussion when the first reaction is "backlash!". Which unfortunately happened way, way earlier in this thread than this most recent discussion, before I even saw LLL.

@The Panda I'm wondering if there's something in common with the group of about a dozen films that is well above the overall trendline compared to the rest that track below the trendline (especially those with at least 20M+ views).

That was a great punchline to a very thorough review.

It's worth nothing that these two options (in the case of leaving only one film unranked) are functionally identical - they cannot make a difference to the outcome of the vote. So it's really up to you. This exact question hasn't been asked before so I'll defer to @The Panda. But with regards to not participating in a category you haven't seen any nominees for, his answer was essentially "up to you". (ie. vote without seeing, or abstain)

Yikes, I didn't mean to imply the GA reaction was "mixed" in the sense of good and bad like BvS or something like that - the comparison was to the Arts staff at the Times (which I guess I could have worded more clearly). They're not exactly dumping on it either, just some who are less than thrilled. And yes, obviously they're able to speak towards why they didn't like it in a way that is more informed than your average person, that's why it's useful to provide the perspective. Amazingly, there are average people who don't know who Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers are, that can still recognize the difference between great singing and dancing and not-so-great. GA metrics are tricky, since there's no one doing a proper sampling, but 85% approval on Rotten Tomatoes (so 15% of ratings being below 3.5) is pretty good, but not quite great. It suggests there's a meaningful number of people who ended up either not liking it or only sort-of liked it. (The upper limit for RT audience approval for wide-releases is around 94%.) The critic for the Toronto Star gave La La Land a 4/4 rating, and he actually recently wrote an article defending that rating: Point I'm making here is that enough people didn't love LLL to justify the NY Times or Toronto Star or any other newspaper writing a piece saying "let's acknowledge not everyone loves this".