Jason

I personally liked HTTYD more than TS3 as well. It would have gotten my vote, but the available evidence suggests that would be a minority opinion among critics and even general audiences (although that's a close one), not just the Academy. KFP over WALL-E and Anomalisa over Inside Out are definitely minority opinions. Song of the Sea probably really did lose to BH6 because of less exposure (ie. being smaller), but that's Disney. I guess the point I'm making is that I don't think Pixar films (with the possible exception of Brave) are beating smaller films in Academy voting because of greater exposure. Thanks for sharing though, I was genuinely curious, because I haven't seen a lot of smaller films myself. Persepolis and Anomalisa are on the priority list now. Edit: I see some more people replied, while I typed this. Shaun the Sheep is on the list now as well. (Princess Kayuga was already there). I loved When Marnie Was There, better than Inside Out for me personally as well.

I've now adjusted all eight HP films for both exchange rate changes and ticket price increases. I haven't adjusted for 3D specifically because I can't find the data needed to make accurate adjustments. (Percentage of tickets sold in 3D by market, and price difference for 3D compared to regular by market.) That being said, it will partly be taken into account for in the average ticket price increase. Full details on methods for ER calculations are here, list of ticket prices is here, and full details of methods for ticket price calculations are here. Exchange rates are current as of November 11. "WW", "WW ER", and "WW TP" columns show respectively the original, exchange rate adjusted, and ticket price adjusted worldwide grosses. The "Dom" and "Adj D" columns show respectively the original and ticket price adjusted domestic grosses. The "OS", "OS ER", and "OS TP" columns show respectively the original, ER adjusted, and ticket price adjusted OS grosses. The "%Tr" column shows the percentage of the OS gross from individually tracked territories with exchange rate data. The "%Ti" column shows the percentage of the OS gross from tracked territories with ticket price data. The adjustment for the remainder of the OS gross is extrapolated from the territories where data is available. Adjusted figures are shown in bold. The figures do not take into account market growth in China that is a result of rising admissions rather than ticket prices. There's really no good way of doing that, since the expansion of the Chinese market has not resulted in a consistently proportional growth in the grosses of films (at least among Hollywood releases).

The only year that a Pixar film has beaten a film (of any size) with better reception is 2012, with Brave beating Frankenweenie and Wreck-it Ralph. Are there any smaller films that you feel deserved the award over Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, or Inside Out, purely based on their own merits?

Um, I'm always supportive of extra fact-checking, but I'm pretty sure you linked to the exact same article that BoxOfficeChica already provided? Was that the intention?

Right now, my picks for most likely nominees: Zootopia Kubo and the Two Strings Moana The Red Turtle Your Name I think Zootopia and Kubo are locked. April and the Extraordinary World, Finding Dory, and My Life as a Zucchini are strong competitors for the final three spots, not necessarily in that order. The Little Prince and Miss Hokusai I would consider surprise possibilities. I don't think anything else has a chance. We've seen relatively weak films in the past receive a nomination, but this is by far the most competitive year ever in terms of the number of high quality submissions.

The quoted version isn't the film version, it's the pop version, similar to the end credits version of Let It Go. I'm looking forward to the film version, I think it'll be great.

You clearly prefer to err on the side of caution - it's not just plausible, it's locked. Only $2.2M required to pass BvS at this point. At minimum $0.5M more from domestic, $1M from Australia, Italy, and Poland combined, and $1M from all other remaining markets, total of $2.5M. Will probably be a little bit more than that from domestic and from the three most recent OS markets, and a good bit more from the other remaining markets. Minimum final gross, $873.6M. Somewhere around or just short of $875M is more likely.

Moana Beauty and the Beast Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Sing La La Land Rogue One Passengers The Red Turtle The LEGO Batman Movie Dunkirk

27 ANIMATED FEATURES SUBMITTED FOR 2016 OSCAR® RACE

Oops, nearly forgot again. If it's not too late: Moana Beauty and the Beast Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Sing La La Land Rogue One Arrival Passengers The Red Turtle Dunkirk

Another review for Your Name has been added to RT as of yesterday, average now at 8.6. I know it's still early, but I actually think that Your Name is a more likely nominee than either Miss Hokusai or April. Making the usual statistical assumptions, there's only about an 8% chance of Your Name having a final rating that falls below 8.0. The assumption of a normal distribution is a bit questionable for films with high ratings, so the real chance will be at least slightly higher than that. But for perspective, the chance of a film with a Zootopia-like distribution of ratings to randomly have its first five rated reviews all with an equivalent rating of 8/10 or higher is only 15%.

Thanks, I did take that into account when drawing my conclusions (which aren't affected for that post, but would have been affected the post a few pages back). The chart above is mostly automatically generated because I'm lazy and I'll just pull the values from a BOM table using VLOOKUP. But I figured stuff out in the chart I posted previously, and forgot this chart would have had some of wrong values. I'll fix it. Edit: Now fixed.

Every single year where a smaller film like Kubo or The Red Turtle has won, it was a clear frontrunner in terms of critical reception. (No other film being statistically tied in terms of average RT rating, treating the critic ratings as individual samples.) In four of the six years thus far lacking a single critical reception frontrunner, the film with the highest domestic box office has won. In three of those six years a Disney-distributed film won. It's worth noting though that was no Disney film nominated in one of the two years where a Disney film didn't win, and multiple Disney-distributed films in two of the years where a Disney film did win. Here's a full table listing previous nominees, with their domestic box office takes, average RT ratings, and distributor. Winning films, highest box office, and highest RT ratings (including statistical ties) are in bold. This year will lack a single critical reception frontrunner unless Your Name ends up with an average final rating of about 8.9 (very unlikely, no other film even has a chance). Unless Finding Dory gets a nomination (quite possible), Zootopia will be the expected winner anyway based purely on the aforementioned past patterns. That being said, I do think Zootopia's chances are further increased by the fact that it is clearly Disney's favourite, as well as how topical it has turned out to be. (I'm always a little hesitant about 100% though. @cannastop gets a like for guts.)

Yeah I don't blame you. Some friends said they were going to do nothing but watch korean dramas for the next week or so, I'm probably going to go on a Disney spree.

It's going to be close, but yes. Don't have the numbers for the Australia, Italy, and Poland for this week yet, but I suspect there's still at least $0.5M remaining in those markets combined. At least another $0.5M remaining domestic, and at least another $2M remaining in all other overseas markets. Here's what the weekly gains look like up to October 30: My projection, based on weekend actuals up to October 28-30:

Do studios usually announce their films more than a few years in advance? I don't think we had release dates for many of the movies we've had this year back in 2011 and 2012. My guess would be that there will be plenty of good movies in 2020 and beyond, and it's just too early to announce them yet.

Hmm. I actually don't think that the Animation branch is influenced by more recent release date when nominating films, especially given that they are required to watch all of them. I compared the release date of the 48 nominees since 2004 against 115 submitted films since then that missed the nomination (and have a release date available on Box Office Mojo), and when you take into account that the June and November Disney (incl. Pixar) releases are almost always nominated, it's very hard to see any pattern in favour of films released later in the year. Here's a graph showing the number of films in their respective category by release month:

I don't think either Kubo or The Red Turtle will have a chance against Zootopia for the win. Their overall reception hasn't been clearly better (about the same from a statistical standpoint), and Zootopia will have the advantage amongst the Academy-at-large of having greater popularity.

I don't think anyone has suggested that Your Name had a chance of winning an Oscar, just that it had a better chance of being nominated next year rather than this year? Anyway, I think it's too early to be sure that it doesn't have a chance of a nomination this year. There are only six reviews so far on RT, four of which provide a score. That being said, applying the usual statistical assumptions (random sampling, normal distribution) from those four reviews results in a 80% 90% chance of having an average final rating above 7.6. Of the 30 films with at least that rating or higher that have been submitted to the Academy since 2004, only four have missed a nomination (Waltz with Bashir, Ponyo, The Rabbi's Cat, The Lego Movie), and never more than one in any given year. However, this year will have at least two films with an average rating of 7.6 or higher miss the nomination (presuming Moana is nominated), and will probably end up with a total of three such films missing the nomination. (Since Your Name will probably have a rating of 7.6 or higher.) So this year is definitely more competitive than most years, and the lower end of Your Name's predicted final rating suggests a film that would be nominated in most years but probably not this year. However, if Your Name ends up doing as well or better in its remaining reviews as it has so far (final rating of 8.5 or higher), then it will almost certainly be nominated this year as well. If it does end up getting nominated this year, then I don't think there would have been any advantage to waiting another year.

Moana Beauty and the Beast Hacksaw Ridge Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Sing La La Land Rogue One Arrival Passengers Doctor Strange

Yikes, nearly forgot this week. If it isn't too late: Moana Beauty and the Beast Hacksaw Ridge Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Sing La La Land Rogue One Arrival Passengers The Red Turtle

Over in the "What Year Will China Pass Domestic?" thread @No Prisoners has made a few excellent posts explaining why Chinese box office growth would be likely to slow down or more recently, why it is slowing down. Essentially there's generally a natural ceiling of gross box office relative to the GDP of a country (about 0.05-0.07%), and extrapolations of continuing rapid growth were ignoring the existence of that ceiling. Now that the China's box office is close to that ceiling, we should expect annual growth to be similar to rate of GDP growth instead of the rapid expansion of previous years. I think this is his most recent post describing the subject in full:

I posted one near the bottom of page 9 but I suppose there's been enough films since then to warrant an update. List is spoiler-tagged below.

The weekend numbers are now posted. It's possible though that Universal is no longer providing daily tracking though. Keep an eye on it to see if Monday numbers are posted at the usual time today or not.

Alright, so I've added a new table with OS and WW grosses adjusted for ticket price inflation as well as exchange rates. For now I have ticket price adjusted grosses for the films in the $1B club, but I hope to complete the rest in the next couple weeks. My method for adjusting the OS gross combines exchange rate adjustment with the ratio of the local currency ticket price at release (calculated where necessary from US$ ticket price) and the extrapolated local ticket price for 2016 (using the local rate of inflation in the past two years). My reason for combining exchange rate adjustment with local currency ticket prices rather than a simpler direct comparison between the US$ ticket prices is that exchange rates can occasionally change much faster than the rate of inflation. For example, from July to December 2014 the US dollar strengthened about 13% against a basket of currencies, which is faster than the local rate of inflation in almost all the countries I have data for. I'm using a local ticket price extrapolated to 2016 rather than 2015 prices since I think we're most interested in comparing historical grosses to films currently in release. The error introduced by extrapolation will be less than the difference between 2016 and 2015 prices. I will replace the estimated ticket prices with actual 2016 prices once data comes in early next year. For films with spring or summer release dates, the local ticket price is simply the average ticket price for that year. For films with fall or winter releases I've used the average of the ticket prices from the preceding/following years. I think this will result in a more accurate adjustment based on patterns I've observed from closer examination of the adjusted domestic list at BOM. (If you reverse-calculate the original average ticket prices for films, releases such as Avatar have an average ticket price in between that of the preceding/following years. Spring/summer releases have an average ticket price generally reflective of the average ticket price for that year.) The adjustment for the OS gross that is not from tracked territories or where no ticket price data is available is extrapolated from the territories where data is available. This should be more accurate than no adjustment at all, given the broad agreement with overall exchange rate and ticket price trends for films in a given year. For films released from 1998-2004, the TP adjusted grosses are adjusted by an additional "fudge factor" that takes into account that the limited territories where data is available have a generally lower rate of inflation than those from where data is missing. This fudge factor is empirically determined by comparing adjustments using 2005 ticket prices with the limited territories from 1998-2004 and with the full data set. It is highest for films released in 2004 and lower in earlier films, due to the larger grosses from emerging markets. Also, four films added to the table (as of October 24): Titanic Captain America: Civil War Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace Archived tables from October 10 (ER adjustment only), for reference purposes: