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Our Weekend Forecast

January 15, 2010

Utilizing our free online package calculator, Marquee Stars offers the following box office prognostications for the upcoming weekend.  They represent “typical” performance expectations as derived from recent moving averages in combination with regression analysis.  Forecast results are charted against box office outcomes as they become available in the Latest Forecast Results section below.

The below prognostications were finalized on Friday morning, February 5th, based on the last announced screen counts.

Marquee Stars developed its online package calculator more as an afterthought - a natural outgrowth of the methodology we use to double-check our marquee rankings.  We hope to inspire a more inventive approach to and greater creative freedom for marquee packaging by providing filmmakers with a simple war gaming capability … in stark contrast to the traditional list of a half dozen celebrities preferred by one given marketer or another.

Just as political campaigns use polling results to brainstorm which issues to emphasize or which running mates to consider, we thought that content professionals at all levels ought to have access to a similar tool for approximating the relative strength of different marquee package combinations based on typical box office outcomes.

Marquee Stars subsequently received numerous queries with an obvious question: Exactly how reliable is our package calculator?

We do not believe in crystal balls.  And we know that using moving averages that assume a standard deviation to foretell box office outcomes that follow a Pareto distribution is rather like driving a horse-drawn carriage with one square wheel.  Below a certain speed it gets rather wobbly.  Also, given the great volatility of other market factors, typical performance results may or may not offer sufficient consistency for decision makers.

So we decided to test the calculator on an ongoing basis…  Every week or so, Marquee Stars will publish in advance our package calculator’s prognostications for the opening weekend of one or two upcoming theatrical films.  Prognostications differ from a prediction in that they project variable outcomes based on indicators.  They neither promise nor guarantee performance.

Each upcoming film will receive usually two of three possible prognostications:  1) for “mainstream” breadth of appeal (over $38 million final box office gross) or 2) for supercharged “tentpole” films (over $410 million final box office gross), and 3) for “specialty & genre” appeal (under $38 million).  Again, Marquee Stars does not predict how well a film will click with audiences.  Although our prognostications take the form of a box office appraisal, our package calculator is actually designed to anticipate the relative box office strength of a given marquee combination under different performance scenarios.

That’s not quite the same thing:

• Our prognostications generally do not identify which outcome is more likely. We have, however, provided a modified-Pareto chart called “Probable Opening Weekend Grosses for Bellwether Films” that identifies the statistical likelihood of every opening weekend outcome over the previous two years.
• The appropriate prognostication for each film should not be compared directly with the actual box office outcome, although the appraisal number often will be close. Instead, the anticipated box office relationship between the marquee elements of the different films should be compared to their actual relationship.
• The real purpose of the Package Calculator is to war-game the comparative strengths of different marquee combinations.