Jason

1. Zootopia 2. Finding Dory 3. Kung Fu Panda 3 Haven't seen Angry Birds, will probably see Secret Life of Pets next week.

I'm seeing a lot of Internet ads for Kubo all of a sudden. Hopefully the word's getting out, I think Kubo's got a lot of potential as long as people know about it.

Mhmm, I just don't remember offhand how to do the signficance test, something Google could probably cure, but I gotta scoot real soon. Anyway, N = 84 for the second graph, and N = 191 for the first.

I agree it can't prove anything. In a situation like this though, even if there is a relationship between frontloading and time progression, we couldn't possibly expect an R-squared anywhere near 0.5 because there's obviously far more important factors explaining the variation in multipliers (WOM being the most obvious, although hard to quantify). An R-squared of 0.05 simply means only 5% of the variance is being explained by an imperfect linear model. I don't expect to be able to prove that that 5% of the variance is statistically significant so I'm probably not going to bother trying. (And I'll be honest, my stats is too rusty for me to recall the best way of going about it, anyway.) But if we set the bar for what we're discussing here to statistically significant, P<0.05, we might not even be able to prove indicators of WOM are correlated with multipliers. Edit: Now that I think about it, given the size of the sample I think there's a good chance that the R squared of 0.055 in the first graph actually is significant (P<0.05). But hopefully @MikeQ is on the job (see below). Also, I take back what I said about indicators of WOM, there's probably more than enough data for that. But I'm not volunteering to do it!

On closer inspection of the graph I did above, the trend is noticeable from around 2000-2010, but isn't noticeable for the past 5 years. So I just did a quick graph of the 2011-2016 films (inclusive), again using unadjusted figures: Based on this data set of films with unadjusted OW of over $50M, there really isn't any correlation at all in the past five years. (The trendline does go upwards slightly, but the R-squared value of 0.009 suggests 1% of the variance can be explained by the date - which is so small it's probably just noise.)

Alright, so I just graphed all the multipliers of films with $50M OW or more against the date. I didn't adjust for inflation, so the graph is biased towards more recent films (which could be a big problem). I'll fix that if I find a table with adjusted OW or when I get a chance to do it manually. There's plenty of other reasons to take the graph with a huge grain of salt, but here it is: Based on the line of best fit, the average yearly decline in the multiplier of films with OW over $50M is 0.046. However, only about 5% of the variance in multipliers can be explained by the date. (Which isn't an unexpected result, in my opinion.)

BvS audience score is 66%, even though critic score is 27%. TF2 has audience score of 58% against the critic score of 19%. IDR it's 37% vs 32%. The point I'm making is that for the other films the critic score is disconnected from the audience score, but for IDR they are both bad. And I think it's exactly for the reason you give: the other films may be flawed but ultimately a majority of the general audience can still connect to them in some way.

Difference is that the other movies you cited still had a decent audience score on RT, significantly higher than the critic score. Audience score for IDR is 37%.

I've seen a surprisingly small number of these. I'm going to rank all of the ones I've seen, but it'd be a big stretch to call #6 and #7 "favourites". 1. Zootopia 2. Frozen 3. The Force Awakens 4. Return of the King 5. The Dark Knight 6. The Hobbit 7. Minions

Increased strength of the USD means ER-adjusted OS total of IA4 is only about $560M. I'm not sure if OS audiences will finally tire of this (although I think they ought to). But I don't see this doing much better than the ER-adjusted total of IA4. My prediction: $550M OS, $100M DOM, $650M WW.

What was the R-squared? I'm not doubting your conclusion, just want to know exactly how weak the correlation was.

If Alice 2 reaches ¥4 billion in Japan that will actually be pretty comparable to its drop in other markets. (Overall OS drop is about 70% atm, taking into account stronger USD but not ticket price inflation, and neglecting the small amount of remaining potential gross.)

Here is the Finding Dory #1 of 2016 club: Anyone in that club would necessarily be predicting Dory over BvS even if not giving a specific prediction for BvS. I couldn't find a BvS #1 of 2016 club (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist), but for a flavour of BvS predictions, I did find these: Not too many names that I can find in both the Dory and BvS clubs, but there's at least a couple that had a higher number for Dory than for BvS (JohnnyGossamer, Ethan Hunt).

It's definitely possible. If Moana does $1B or more, then I think the only likely threat is Fantastic Beasts. I don't think Suicide Squad will do well enough overseas to hit $1B, and Ice Age won't do well enough in NA to hit $1B.

$90M for Pets seems a little high to me. I think ~$75M more likely.

It was discussed, but the directors (Howard and Greno) weren't interested: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/tangled/33887/exclusive-why-disney-never-made-tangled-2.

I think Zootopia 2 could end up being in 2022 as well. Presuming it does get released in 2021, why did you go with November 5 instead of November 24?

Gigantic has been moved to November 21, 2018, so that's at least one original film between Wreck-It-Ralph 2 (March 9) and Frozen 2, which at the earliest could be November 2019. I suspect there will be at least one original film between Frozen 2 and Zootopia 2 as well.

Apparently there's a company that trademarked "Moana" as one of their perfumes: article here.

Nope, check out this club. I'm also expecting Moana to be big WW, of course.

Honestly, I think $1B WW is nearly guaranteed. At this point $450M is the floor for domestic total, meaning that at most $550M is required OS. After ER adjustments, Frozen and Zootopia exceed that number, Toy Story 3 falls just short (~$20M), and Inside Out falls ~$75M short. Even with Inside Out as a rough baseline, I'm sure Dory can make up that $75M from somewhere. There's actually a chance that Dory will exceed IO's total by $75M in just China + Japan alone. It's $15M ahead in China of IO, and Nemo did ¥11B (~$107M at current ER) in Japan, so Dory doing $90M+ seems like a good possibility.

I'm not sure whether that means encouraging theatres to give BFG more screens, or transferring revenue from Dory to BFG (is that even legal/possible?). But I don't see why they have any incentive to do so. Dory is a Pixar film, BFG's production was shared by a number of companies (Amblin, Reliance, Walden, Kennedy/Marshall).

Alright, so full disclosure, I watched this film out of morbid curiosity after reading the reviews here. I wasn't expecting to like it, but I thought at least it could be in the "so bad it's good" category. I was mistaken. The deus ex machina robot mentioned by Pandaren, and their queen personally hunting down said robot instead of staying in a safe location mentioned by Baumer, are the tip of the iceberg of incredible stupidity in this film. Speaking of their queen, she's got the attention span of a squirrel and was more interested in chasing down a bus of kids than the aircraft firing weapons at her. I suppose we were supposed to feel scared for those kids, but sadly, I wasn't. Pretty much the whole climax was a constant "wtf?", and honestly in that context the lack of explanation for the queen's energy shields finally breaking (Maika's scream?) seemed like a minor detail. Why does she take control of everything in her aircraft near her except the fusion thrusters? Why does she have her aircraft fly in a tornado formation around her instead of actually firing their weapons? How can this species have leaders with the attention span of squirrels and manage to defeat the white ball alien race and a host of others? I had far more fun discussing just how stupid it was than actually watching the film. I had far more fun reading the reviews here than I did watching the film. If I had to say something nice about this film, it would be that it's not impossible to be amused by the stupidity of it, and that I can't fault the actors for their performances, considering the lines they were given. F

I would argue that most people in any age bracket don't have a single clue about politics or economics and shouldn't be expected to vote for anything they have no knowledge about, which is precisely why we have representative rather than direct democracy. Anyway, I'm really sorry that I seem to have caused a thread derailment. I only intended my remark as a bit of (perhaps ill-advised) gallows humor, I actually care far more about what's going to happen to people living in the UK than I do about the box office totals. But calculating the impact on box office totals is something I can do, and changing the outcome of anything that's going to happen in the UK is something I can't.

Meanwhile in Europe: the British PM is resigning, the UK might break up, and other countries are threatening referendums too. Over here at BOT our concern is: but how will this affect the global box office?