Jason

I'm glad that Disney changed the name of the film and withdrew their trademark application for the phrase "Dia de Los Muertos", it was clearly causing offence. However, I'd like to point out that trademarking the name of a film is standard practice, and more importantly would only restrict others from using the phrase in association with the film or associated products. There seems to be a widespread (and mistaken) impression that the phrase being trademarked would somehow restrict the use of the phrase in its traditional usage. It would not. For example, the name of our related (though now entirely secularized) holiday, Halloween, has been trademarked multiple times. Each trademark protects only the products or services specifically identified in the application, and does not prevent anyone else from continuing to use the word Halloween. Or to file their own trademark for "Halloween", associated with their own product or service. I think it's understandable that the filmmakers and lawyers at Disney thought nothing of it until complaints were made.

How would you propose doing this? If you do an average absolute difference in rank between lists, the, short lists benefit because there's less variation among the most well-known, well-liked films. I can think of different ways to try and correct for list length, but that can get a bit dicey. Anyway, among the public lists of full length, the most similar list is MovieMan89's, with an average absolute difference in rank of 28.9. The least similar full list is Films's, with an average absolute difference in rank of 49.5.

Thanks, that's very helpful. Turns out I am missing more than three awards (nine!), but Kubo still falls just short of a majority (10/21).

Well, those haven't happened yet - so am I missing three awards or would it be correct to say neither film is winning a majority? Anyway, regarding Zootopia vs. Kubo, I wasn't expecting to like Kubo as much as Zootopia, but I'm a bit sad that it seems I didn't enjoy it as much as many (most?) other people did. I'm not even completely sure why. I didn't dislike it, there was nothing that stood out for me as being bad, I just somehow never got fully immersed into it.

I don't think this is true actually. I have Zootopia and Kubo at 5 each out of a total of 12 awards. Which award(s) am I missing? Would have to be at least three for Kubo to have a majority.

Fair enough. My only point was that he hasn't been gloating about his OW prediction.

Do you mean this conversation? His response wasn't a personal attack, it was a statement of fact. He said you made something up (which you did, whatever your intentions were), which pretty closely fits colloquial use of the word "lying". He didn't say you were generally a liar.

This is just flat-out bullshit. I just checked his post history, and this is what he had to say on the matter (in Baumer's thread): That's a hell of a lot more reasonable and humble than anything you've been saying. At no point did he gloat about how much better his predictions were than other people. That's information anyone can check for themselves, by the way. I'm pretty sure we're being trolled, given that you're completely making shit up now, but I'm not willing to let that stand without correcting the record. Especially given that I don't think he's around at the moment.

Personally, my guess is that a release in December raises multipliers, but also lowers opening weekends, so that the total potential gross doesn't necessarily change that much. I don't know what data to examine (if it exists) to determine whether that guess is correct. It seems to me that in the past, not many films with potential for even $300M+ have been given December releases. My reasoning is that at least some people who would otherwise see a film on opening weekend will wait a week or two for the holidays in December, since the lead-up the holidays is busy for a lot of people, and once the holidays actually arrive a lot of people get time off, making it easier to go in a group with family and friends. At other times of year there isn't generally anything to be gained by waiting. Anecdotally, most of the people I know (which admittedly includes a lot of young people/students) are very committed to seeing Rogue One but are waiting for the holidays, or later this week as friends/siblings finish exams. At other times of year I know many of them would just go on OW.

No, and no. What you think to be a box office event is entirely your opinion. At least some other people here recognize that we don't all get to define what words and terms mean based on just our opinions. It's clear that you use the word "event" more restrictively than would be understood by most people according to general usage of the word. I'm new to box office, but the consensus of posters on this thread with knowledge of the film industry appears to be that they also use the term "event film" more broadly than you do. As for statistical cutoff? There is nothing statistical about the completely arbitrary cutoff you chose.

Alright, here's a scatterplot of almost all the December films on Box Office Mojo (excluding current openers, N=198), and the films from May to August ("summer", N=800). December films are shown with blue diamonds, summer films are shown with red squares. For either summer or December openers, there's a very wide range of multipliers for sub-$25M OWs. Above that range, the upper limit of the multiplier falls off, but the lower limit actually appears to increase - although this could just be an effect of fewer samples at higher OWs. Purely by visual inspection, it can be seen that in the $40M to $90M range, December openers have substantially better legs than summer openers. Aside from TFA (and now Rogue One), there are no December films above $100M, but we can see that summer openers north of $100M have only slightly worse legs on average than those between $40M and $90M. Here's a table showing the population size (N), average, standard deviation (SD), standard error of the mean (SE), and the minimum & maximum multiplier for each group (Avatar was excluded from the December statistics*): I wouldn't read too deeply into the standard deviation/standard error, but suffice it to say that the differences between all three of these groups is statistically significant. The average multiplier of the December films is higher than summer films in the $40M - $90M OW range by about 1 (30%), larger than the 0.6 (20%) difference between the two groups of summer films. Notably, even though summer films over $100M have a lower average than those between $40M and $90M, there's also less variation in that group, and the minimum value in each group is about the same. If similar trends (ie. similar minimum multiplier, average multiplier 30% higher than summer films) were to hold for December films, then we would expect that December films opening over $100M+ to have multipliers of at least ~3, and ~3.8 on average. In my view, the existing data could support either of the following two arguments: December films have significantly better legs than summer films even when controlling for OW, and therefore Rogue One is very likely to have a multiplier of more than 3, and possibly even well above that. We don't know (and perhaps can't yet know) to what degree December films will continue to be leggier than summer films in the $100M+ range, and so should make no assumptions about Rogue One's multiplier based purely from OW. However, it's clear that an argument that Rogue One should have a multiplier around or below 3 based purely on its high OW is unsupported, since there's a very substantial difference between the relationship of multiplier to OW in the range where we have data for both December and summer films. I am personally expecting Rogue One to have a multiplier of at least ~3.3, $500M+.

I don't have the time right now to fully graph out all the data and do the statistics (which, for the record, no one in this thread has done yet despite a claim to the contrary). But a very quick look at a scatterplot of openers from summer months vs. December tells me that once opening weekends exceed $50M or so, the upper limit of the multiplier decreases but the lower limit does not. Admittedly, haven't filtered the data yet to make sure there aren't other confounding variables. That being said, I'm quite sure that Rogue One having a lower multiplier than 3 is unsupported by the data. We simply don't have many December openers over $100M, and extrapolating lower December openings using the relationship from summer films would suggest a multiplier over 3. Directly using the relationship between multipliers and OW from summer films is unsupported because there's very clearly a significant difference between the multiplier of summer films and December films based on openings under $85M (where December data is available).

Beauty and the Beast Coco La La Land Hidden Figures The Red Turtle The LEGO Batman Movie Star Wars Episode VIII Sing Passengers Dunkirk

The CFCA awarded ParaNorman in 2012 and The Wind Rises in 2013, I was expecting them to go for Kubo. Of the local critics associations in the sample I looked at for patterns from previous years, only two left: St. Louis (this Sunday) and Florida (next week?). Expecting at least SLFCA to award Zootopia.

When hell freezes over.

If you adjust the original OS grosses for exchange rate changes and ticket price inflation, it adjusts to about $980M OS. Take it with a grain of salt, because with it being that many years ago there have been other changes that are harder to account for aside from just exchange rate and average ticket price. Here's a table where I post adjusted international grosses. Also has some explanation of my methods, if you're interested. Worth checking out Peludo's post on the first page, he started the thread and mentions some caveats.

Strength of an Oscar campaign is likely less important than for other nominations because the Animation Branch rules for nomination require that all submitted films be assigned a rating, and that the highest-rated films are placed for nomination. Also, members participating in the nomination process must have watched at least two-thirds of the submissions. It's possible that fewer of the Animation Branch members will have watched Your Name compared to Sing given Funimation's lack of a campaign, but there is absolutely no way they are going to assign Sing a higher rating than Your Name. In fact, there's no way Sing is going to be among the Animation Branch's top five most highly rated submissions, so its chances of a nomination are zero.

The rule doesn't give a specific percentage: In fact, with words like "diluted" and "diminished", they've left a lot of room for their own interpretation.

So I saw this FYC ad today: The quote caught my attention. Is it common to use a quote on FYC ads that is credited to a website rather than to a specific critic or writer? For what it's worth, I can't even find that quote on IMDb. (Although it's possible I don't know where to look. Thought IMDb only had user reviews.)

DFW Film Critics Name ‘Moonlight’ Best Film of 2016

Sympathy like. Also, can't argue with Zootopia over Nemo/Dory personally. Although I'm pretty satisfied with Zootopia landing where it did, wouldn't have expected it to beat Nemo.

Hmm. Maybe I have an excuse now? Probably not, I did my numbers shortly before the deadline.