Box Office

It’s not an I told you so. It’s a fail cause it’s barely passed a billion. Star Wars used to be the biggest money maker. Now the fast and the furious movies can put Star Wars to shame and that is truly a shame.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 12, 2020, Original Post Date: Jan 12, 2020 ---

Thanks for pointing out the obvious. Our free speech has been suppressed. Nothing to see here people, move along. Everything is great. No need to let people to express their opinions if they don’t conform to the koolaid that corporate Disney expects

 

Seriously.

We went through devolution of box office threads enough.

For an argument over whether they are or are not good films, go make your own thread and argue away.

This is purely a thread for tracking and I'd appreciate the mistakes made in debating quality in the box office thread which lead to nothing but upset not be repeated.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Well again if I started a thread it would be removed. My track record until today wash flawless. No negative ratings, but now cause I haven’t complied to conformity I’ll be suppressed. Congates on not letting all voices be heard

 

I can appreciate your sentiment. But where can I properly express my opinions on this site without offending anyone while trying to express my feelings opinions and thoughts regardless of the personal beliefs. I joined this site cause it seemed to be a true Star Wars fan site.

 

I understand that it’s the rules. I’ve always questioned authority. I wish I could Express my feelings on this site properly. I don’t want to attack anyone individual(s). Unfortunately this site has taken that ability away. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. You are all good people and don’t deserve what I’ve typed today. Unfortunately there is no other place for me to express myself about this. I truly do feel shame for what I’ve typed here today, but it had to be typed so that people will read, maybe not understand but at least read the 20/30% feelings of what has transpired.

 

No offense, but could this side tangent get migrated to the feedback section instead of having a discussion on the ethicality of conversation in the TROS box office thread?

Cheers,
Jayson

 

@TrumanJ, stop it. You swung in here with your sabre rattling today. Here are some quotes from the first post you made today, your first post in 2 months.

Then you have the audacity to accuse the replyer of coming after you when they answer your accusations. Then you complain that you're not allowed to state your opinion while simultaneously complaining about people stating their opinion to your posts. STOP IT NOW! This is not funny. This is not cute. And, "I have opposed authorities all my life" is not a defense. Stop it.

 

I don’t take pride in what has happened today. I will stop . But please understand the other side. Sure we may not agree with how Luke, Leia and Han were treated, but for those who are upset about how the ST was treated, please take a little more time and understand that we aren’t all right wing nuts. But we also do want to be acknowledged not just forgotten about cause what we think doesn’t matter cause we didn’t comply

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 12, 2020, Original Post Date: Jan 12, 2020 ---

94 times. Is that a random number or an actual precise number of my thoughts and beliefs here? I’m not trying to continue this argument. I just want to know if you truly know this information indispensably.

 

Only around 45 movies have reached the 1 billion mark. If TROS reaches 1 billion it is still an accomplishment and I don’t think Disney is going to be upset about a movie that makes 1 Billion

 

Well, hey hey! Look at what we got this weekend!
Like Rocky, this thing may have been down, but it's not out!

It came back this weekend with an average change rate of 1% each day, or 38% change rate to the change rate per day, which is a nice push in the upward direction.
Enough to put it back on track to the billion mark properly within the week, possibly within a few days. However, the weekdays could teeter off sharply again, so we might be waiting for more toward the latter part of the week to weekend if that happens.

Note: when I refer to change rates, I'm talking about cumulative total change rate, not the change rate between each day's stand-alone revenue. So a 1% move in this meaning is lateral to a day that had a 73% increase over the prior day's stand-alone earnings. Sorry if that's confusing.
But it's the difference between calculating the 7 dollars total today, vs total 8 dollars tomorrow instead of the 50 cents earned today and the dollar earned tomorrow.

To put this into perspective a tad, this weekend will be a -67% drop from the previous weekend.
I know, that sound terrible, but wait. The second weekend was a -56% drop, while the third weekend was a -64% drop from the second.
So the drop rate SLOWED down this weekend compared to last weekend's change rate from it's previous weekend.
It slowed down by about the same as it fell, -67%. Meaning, the change rate between -56 and -64 is 14% increase in drop rate, while -64 to -67 is only a 4% increase to the drop rate, so overall the shift between the two sets is a hefty 67% drop to the drop rate. Which is a nice pump on the breaks.

But hey! This thing moved some good direction in a nice gain over the weekend and shifted its overall forecast up north a bit (see the nice little bump upward in the forward direction of the grey area of the domestic)

On the Global forecast, it's inching ever closer to TLJ little by little - sitting at just around 1.1 Billion possibility at the moment (and each weekend can push that further up because my model doesn't account for wobbles between weekend and weeday cycles, all days are the same calculated day as an aggregate function).

Come on 1.2 Billion! It's a long stretch, but come on!!







Cheers,
Jayson

 

Coupla thoughts...

1. Aside from questioning who is or is not a real fan, which I find completely unacceptable, I appreciate letting someone like @TrumanJ speak their mind freely. So yea, as long as they can keep the personal attacks out, I'd rather not see people ganging up and shaming them. Especially since they seem remorseful. Now, I'm only judging based on skimming the last page or so, so maybe there is a history there I'm not aware of. *shrug*

2. @Jayson - I've heard of that score metric but I've looked over their methods in the past, and reviewed them again now, and don't find them to be any more valuable than the user-generated scores I presented. Not for my purposes anyway (see third and second-to-last paragraphs below for explanation on that).

"There are 35 to 45 teams of CinemaScore representatives present in 25 large cities across North America. Each Friday, representatives in five randomly chosen cities give opening-day audiences a small survey card. The card asks for age, gender, a grade for the film (A, B, C, D or F), whether they would rent or buy the film on DVD or Blu-ray, and why they chose the film. CinemaScore typically receives about 400 cards per film."

Now, first of all, TLJ got an "A" and TROS got a "B+" on this scale. Definitely a difference, but not a gigantic one. Similar to the scores I presented, it shows a trend but not a super strong one.

The reasons why I'm not crazy about the CinemaScore methods are...
a. Small sample size. ~400 cards? That's quite small.
b. Only in big cities?
c. Only five cities?
d. Only in North America?

Now, I don't know if I properly explained this earlier, but the reason why I want this movie to succeed is because I want the Star Wars community to feel united again and be friendly and get along, etc. So, the casual movie-goer or film critic is, by their own choice, not part of that culture -- they simply aren't interested enough to join us in this circle. Which is totally cool, but it means I'm not going to be crossing paths with them on Twitter or these forums or at a convention.

So, that's why if the user-generated scores are more reflective of the kind of person who is more likely to be invested in the fiction, and thus motivated to vote, then that actually means more to me, individually. Does that make sense? Again, it's not a judgement on "casual" fans or gatekeeping or anything. I'm trying to earnestly explain why some metrics would mean more to me than others. The more invested Star Wars fans live all over the world, beyond those cities, and definitely in suburban/rural areas. You brought up gender earlier, but I think even a sample that leans male is more indicative of the invested fan because they actually tend to be male. I'm not proud of that or anything, and I wish my wife liked SW even more than she does, and I hope my daughter loves it when she gets old enough to understand .... English. =P But yea, I think that's the reality at the moment.

I hope this is not taken as a debate from me, just a discussion. I'm not trying to be challenging or combative but I know sometimes text on its own can sound that way when discussing differing opinions.

 

The reason that Cinemascore is superior is because it's randomized, rather than self-elected, firstly.
They release between 400 and 600 ballots across 1500 screens, which is a good randomized sample pool for demography. They release and gather everything on opening night to remove as much demographic bias as possible.
The standard margin for error is 6%, which is incredibly good.

This is another good thing about them, and why I find them of worthwhile quality.
They apply standard statistical weighting for their population size like proper demography.

About a year or so ago (almost 2) I went through and broke down every major online pole and their data for a ton of film reviews (over 200) from users and found that the only two that were marginally weighting correctly (showed a proper bell curve) were Metacritic critic scores and IMDB user scores.

However, the weight in the bell curve is higher than the middle of the scale for IMDB, indicating that users are inherently bias in favoring the films if they are coming to review films.
RT has almost no bell curve for its critics, which means it's absolute garbage because it's too polarized to either crap or great.
RT Audience isn't much better. Though it's slightly bell curved like IMDB, it has massive low end spikes, which indicates users showing up to rate moderately alright for most films, very well for some, and a surprisingly high amount of isolated numerical spiking in the low ends....meaning, people are mostly saying nothing of value in the data that separates one film from the other, and when they do it's polarized mostly between high and lows.
In fact, the lows are surprisingly acute in their placement in such a way that it screams that the data is not properly being weighted much at all.

So basically, the "best" online user reviews are Metacritic and IMDB (Metacritic user reviews not charted - I seem to have lost that slide, but it was similar to the Metascore for the most part, though leaned top heavy a tad like IDMB).



But the problem with ALL of these is that this isn't the general audience.
This is "People who watch movies, and knowingly engage in visiting movie review sites and voting on them."

So basically, if you're interested in what people who like to sit around and talk about what they thought of movies think about movies, then these sites are for you.
Or, in Metacritic's case, (since it has a good curve) have an interest in what people who get paid to sit around and critique the art of film think.

If you want to know what the general audience thought, this isn't the place to look.

And if you are looking for the feedback of those who like to review movies, then stay away from RT and lean more towards Metacritic or IMDB for better weighted values that are more accurately representing a proper relationship to the rating's distance from the mean of the film sample pool population.

Unless ... you just happen to find that your personal taste often happens to align with Fandango or RT, then just stick with that because it means you have a taste similar to that pool's weight (wonky as it might be).

Cinimascore is more like Metacritic's critic's review (because metacritic is gathering reviews that aren't being self-electively given), and that is always a more solid picture.

Which is why when the industry wants to pay to know what people think of their film, they don't look at Rotten Tomatoes...they pay to get the data from Cinemascore.

People with millions and millions (billions really) invested in business management of these films aren't idiotic enough to use a data gathering source that has proved horribly unreliable for their return on investment strategy feedback.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The cards that Cinemascore uses also have information on age, sex, and race. That demographic information is very valuable to studios and a big reason they pay for the surveys.

But it is a very small sample size, only a few cities, and only on opening night, and just as prone to bring off as any other poll or survey.

There’s just no perfect way to predict anything precisely with polls and surveys or box office numbers and elections wouldn’t have so many surprises.

 

Quite.
ALL sampling is imperfect (even CERN, and that's as nearly perfect as it gets and there's still room for error).

With demography, it's a matter of following good statistical rules for your sample size. Cinemascore is one of the more reliable sources because of their control methods.

Metacritic critics is also good (if you want to know what critics thought). Any self-elected poll service immediately has a bias built right into it that makes, in my opinion, the values not very useful to answering what the general goer thought of a film.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Star Wars shouldn't decline, but it does and that will concern Disney the most imo.
The movie isn't a flop, but its certainly not what Disney expected from the big final of the biggest saga of all time.

Its just my personal view but for me TROS is also the last movie in the saga that is bulletproof in terms of flopping. Everybody was hyped about the ST because a.- new movies and b. - the OT characters would be back .
If the new movies in the "new" setting does not connect to the audience Star Wars and Lucasfilm will face some serious problems.

 

I think box office numbers and movie reviews are fascinating. I equate it will sports fans following game statistics. You want to see your team win. But in the end, you still like what you like. The number of box office bombs and poorly reviewed movies in my list of all time favorites is high. (It's very high.)

As for Star Wars declining, I don't think the Sequels are any worse of than the Prequels. Yes, I know there are issues when comparing movies via "adjusted for inflation" lists, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless:

Star Wars adjusted for inflation:

originals prequels sequels

Star Wars - $1,497,057,186
The Force Awakens - $1,006,872,847
The Empire Strikes Back - $880,005,730
Return of the Jedi - $847,248,129
The Phantom Menace - $822,741,783
The Last Jedi - $628,253,896
Rogue One - $556,450,789
Revenge of the Sith - $540,446,942
Attack of the Clones - $487,136,844
The Rise of Skywalker - $478,169,690 (still in theaters)
Solo - $213,767,512

The Rise of Skywalker should soon overtake AotC. It looks to me like the prequels and sequels each had a movie that exceeded expectations and another that fell short of expectations. I don't see any cause for alarm. The first movie of each trilogy performs the best. Only Solo seems to be an outlier, and I still enjoyed it very much.

 

Kudos to @Jayson for going into super detail about the polling methods. In the box office predictions thread I had mentioned that it's somewhat easy to measure interest in a film, but projections are more difficult to make when you don't know how well a film is liked. Box Office Pro started adjusting down once the reviews rolled in because they do have an effect. Once you factor in the audience reviews it's really a testament of how powerful the Star Wars IP is at driving traffic to the theater.

Star Wars isn't in decline. I'm super excited about some new stories. The galaxy needs to grow past the Skywalkers.