Jason

I didn't enjoy it that much personally. But it is among the best films of this year in terms of its critical reception.

Beauty and the Beast La La Land Rogue One Coco Sing The Red Turtle Passengers The LEGO Batman Movie Dunkirk Hidden Figures

New ranking: Zootopia Moana Finding Dory The Little Prince Kubo Kung Fu Panda 3 The Secret Life of Pets Sausage Party Ice Age 5 Moana would easily be #1 for me in most other years.

I think Moana is going to end up being one of my all-time favourites (just saw it today). Zootopia wins because it is my all-time favourite. The friend I saw Moana with also liked Zootopia more. Obviously there will be people for whom Moana will be the better movie, but I can't help but wonder if Moana coming so soon after Zootopia might cause it to suffer by comparison.

Just checked Frozen's performance real quick, just in the English-speaking countries for now. Will be interesting to do a northern hemisphere vs. southern hemisphere analysis comparing Frozen and Moana at the end of its run. Figures in US$ millions, to normalize the grosses, I calculated a percentage of the gross box office (I used 2014, but 2013 wouldn't have made much difference):

Let's be clear, he won't have called anything right because he said FB would "whip" Moana, which I guess is a bit ambiguous but really ought to be more than beating it by just $10M or $20M. More importantly, his original FB>Moana club that triggered the "debate" in the first place had FB over Moana by $200M.

Even if you take into account that Fantastic Beasts is part of the Harry Potter universe, the data from the opening weekend alone suggests that a sub-2.5x multiplier is too low. The following graph shows the multiplier vs. the OW/OD ratio (internal multiplier, I think it's called?) for the Friday-release Harry Potter films only and for a broader set of winter releases*. The broader set of winter releases has a pretty weak correlation (although still statistically significant), which is unsurprising given that it shows most $50M OW releases from September to April, including those being released on holiday weekends. Without doing any detailed statistical analysis, or further breaking down the winter release subset into groups, my guess is that Harry Potter films don't significantly differ from most other films in their relationship between the OW/OD ratio - in other words, their low multipliers can be predicted from the OW/OD ratio alone. This can be observed visually by the large number of other films clustering around the Harry Potter films. Nevertheless, the narrow subset of Harry Potter films (two of which are summer releases) does have the advantage of showing a pretty strong correlation between their multiplier and OW/OD ratio (which is probably because it filters for other factors not related to Harry Potter). Using that relationship, we can predict Fantastic Beasts (OW/OD=2.5) to have a final multiplier of 2.8. Anything lower than 2.5 would be well outside of the typical relationship for Harry Potter films. *Note: I borrowed the winter release dataset from another sheet I already had for something else, it's filtered for at least $50M opening weekends and a number of criteria of no relevance to this particular graph. Also, I don't know that summer releases have a different relationship, this was just for my convenience.

We had one go off when I was in high school, on a day when the temperature was hovering around -2 (28 F for any curious Americans). Most of us didn't have time to grab our coats before evacuating. Turns out it was because of a student trying to dodge a test. One of the teachers joked that instead of suspending the kid they should just announce who it is, the rest of the school would have beaten them to a pulp.

Please take my name too. Thursday's numbers don't change the fact that it's not happening.

I think we've been getting a fresh batch of films most weekends. Although there may have been a couple where Chasmmi was too busy.

Haha, yeah that makes sense. I didn't have the guts to go that low though.

Yep, I knocked down my Trolls prediction a lot. (13.5→10.5)

That's precisely the point. In that example, one of the Disney films still managed to win, and we can't be sure it was just because of the Pixar name because it's just one example. In 2002, when Spirited Away won against two Disney films, it was very clearly the best film of that year. So we don't have actual evidence of vote-splitting. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that in the absence of evidence I'm not going to presume it will be a problem.

http://playbackonline.ca/ You can get a weekly top 10 (just search for top 10 films) that lists the total cume as well. I just divide that by the domestic total on the same date to get the percentage from Canada.

I don't have much to add to the Ghostbusters analysis that hasn't been said better by anyone else already. But there is one thing I noticed that's a bit unusual - only about 7% of its domestic take was from Canada. Every other film I've looked at this year except Barbershop: The Next Cut has been within a very consistent 8%-10% range. Any insight? I don't think it's a comedy thing, aside from Barbershop all of them fell within that same 8%-10% range.

The "Lego snub" may suggest that the Animation Branch rewards skilled animation over script when choosing nominees, but it's the entire Academy that votes for the winner. We've been down this road before, but I'm not convinced that there's any evidence of Disney vote-splitting in previous years. Even if Dory is nominated my bet will be on Zootopia or Moana.

I'd have to take a closer look regarding the question of diversity of animation style. But this year has six films with very strong critical reception: Zootopia, Moana, Kubo, The Red Turtle, Your Name (so far), and My Life as a Zucchini (so far). From 2009 only two films have a similar level of critical reception: Up and Mary and Max. If we relax the criteria for 2009 slightly to allow the inclusion of the rest of the films you mentioned, then this year would also have April, Finding Dory, Miss Hokusai, and The Little Prince. So a total of ten well-received films compared to eight. It may be that you prefer the films from 2009, but if the question is what is generally considered to be the high watermark, I'd give 2016 the edge. Could very well be the clear winner, pending further reviews for Your Name and My Life as a Zucchini.

Added Meet the Robinsons.

This poll was inspired by this post in the Moana thread: A little bit of discussion of this already happened over there. The Disney Wiki suggests Princess and the Frog as the start and offers a number of supporting sources, but I'm curious to know what BOT members think. Seemed like a better idea to create a poll than continuing the discussion over there. *Note: added Meet the Robinsons after the first four votes were in, see posts below.

Omg, I can't believe I forgot, it was definitely one of the better ones. Amended my list from earlier.

1. Zootopia 2. Finding Dory 3. The Little Prince 4. Kubo 5. Kung Fu Panda 3 6. Secret Life of Pets 7. Sausage Party 8. Ice Age 5 (if I'd gone to the theatre for this I'd have left, not even kidding) Excited to see Moana this weekend. Will get around to Storks and Trolls...eventually.

Sounds warm to me. High today in Toronto was 32.

Yes. Notably though, the other non-Ghibli Japanese films that have been submitted in the past also had markedly weaker reception among critics compared to most of the Ghibli nominees, as well as Your Name. So it may very well be that the Animation Branch is responding to quality rather than a bias for Ghibli films (of course, the other possibility is that both critics and the Animation Branch have been biased in a similar way).

If it's good enough quality, I think the Animation branch will recognize that regardless of a strong campaign from Funimation (which I would agree is lacking so far). My biggest concern right now though is that the sample of critical reception for Your Name is not representative, there are far too few American reviews.

Agree with these. I consider the first three locked now, with Zootopia and Moana competing for the win. Still see April, Finding Dory, and My Life as a Zucchini as the most likely competitors with Red Turtle and Your Name for the last two spots, with Miss Hokusai and The Little Prince having an outside chance. This is the most competitive year ever for Best Animated Feature. Presently six submissions with an average RT rating over 8 (previous record was three in 2014 and 2015), and ten submissions with an average rating over 7 (previous record was nine in 2009).