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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, September 21st, 2007 - 9 Comments »

Box Office Hell

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9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Box Office Hell”

  1. waterbucket says:
    September 21, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    I don’t understand how anyone would ever predict a number like 22.8 or 5.9. Why don’t they just round up or down? It’s not like their margin of error is very small. Each week, they’re all off by at least a couple mil.

  2. IOIOIOI says:
    September 21, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    Water; I reckon it has to do with averages based off of other films as well as the time of year among other factours. It may be a duck shoot, but it’s not like they are not aided by some quanitative data. Also… it’s cooler to go with 12.9 then 13 million. Do not ask me why. It just is.

  3. EDouglas says:
    September 22, 2007 at 4:47 am

    I’m not sure why it matters to you so much, waterbucket. There are a lot of factors that go into my predictions and one of them is that… seriously, when has a movie ever made exactly $22,000,000 or $12,000,000? Almost never. And I’ll tell you the same thing that someone told me before I started doing the weekend predictions every week (which I might add, continue to be the first predictions posted by anyone every single week)… if you think you can do better, you’re welcome to try. Predicting weekend box office is often a thankless gig where no one ever says anything when you’re dead-on yet everyone is always jumping on you whenever they disagree.

  4. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 5:40 am

    I’m not belittling your job of box office predicting at all. Because I wouldn’t know what the hell the formula should be to do it and frankly, I don’t really worry that much about how rich the studios will be this year.
    My complaint is regarding the mathematical presentation of the predictions. Of course no film will gross exactly 22 mil just like no candidate will win exactly with 52% of the vote and the number of candy in a jar at the fair is never exactly 180. But when you make predictions with such large margins of error, you can’t present it like Present Bush has an approval rating 44.34 plus or minus 4%. It doesn’t make any sense. And since everybody is likely to be off by at least a couple of mil for the top movies at the box office, they should all round up their predictions since a 0.1 mil in the prediction doesn’t matter if the margin of error is as large as 3 or 4 mil.

  5. Cadavra says:
    September 22, 2007 at 11:05 am

    You might as well ask why gas is $2.89 and 9/10th instead of simply $2.90.

  6. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 11:55 am

    That doesn’t make any sense. If you want to argue statistics then at least show some effort.

  7. Cadavra says:
    September 22, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    Ummm…I was agreeing with you.

  8. waterbucket says:
    September 22, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Ok….thanks? =)

  9. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    September 23, 2007 at 12:47 am

    You could say that more films have grossed $12.4 mil than $12mil exactly so why not?

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