Free Appraisal Guide Download
25 July 2010
No credit cards, no pop-ups, no hidden fees.
Marquee Stars appraises the box office prominence of marquee performers, directors, screenwriters and producers based on algorithmically adjusted moving averages. We also provide a free online calculator for use with our downloaded reports that anticipates the relative market strength of specific marquee package combinations in that 4 to 24-month window prior to release — when most talent-related capital decisions must be made.
Click the image below and follow the link to receive a free PDF download of our complete Marquee Appraisal Guide (allow 30 seconds for processing) or start the video tutorial above to learn more.
Sandra Bullock — Courage at the Top
Sandra Bullock in 'The Blind Side'
Bullock with Ryan Reynolds in 'The Proposal'
At a career stage when most lead actresses fade from the limelight, Sandra Bullock emerged this year with her two personal best box office openers: The Proposal and The Blind Side. Moreover, with her all-time top opener The Blind Side, she did it on her own … as the sole marquee anchor … in a marketplace crowded with new event pictures … by delivering a charismatic Oscar-worthy performance … like nothing she has done before … in a genre different from her usual chick-flick comedies, phone-it-in romances and thrillers buoyed by a popular male co-star. Bullock ought to garner great respect within industry circles for creating this compassionate in-your-face mother character as well as for her bold choice in selecting this project.
Certainly, Bullock knew that if The Blind Side did not work with audiences, studio chiefs might well have regarded it as a decline in her stardom. Instead Bullock signals that her best is yet to come.
Top Actresses
Watts, Connelly, McAdams Top the Best Buy List; Streep, Aniston, Hathaway Balance Price with Prominence
Naomi Watts
Forbes.com’s Celebrity Valuations recently released its compilation of the Top-10 women stars whose last three pictures in over-500 screen releases earned the largest revenues (including box office, DVD and television licensing less budget costs) in proportion with their compensation packages. For example, Naomi Watts’ metric of 44 means $44 were returned for every $1 paid for her services as a performer. Of course, since actual numbers for actor compensation and picture revenues are difficult to verify, the Forbes valuations are based on estimates.
In the chart below, the Forbes valuations are compared with their Marquee Star appraisals. Marquee Stars ranks performers in accordance with box office prominence as expressed in millions of present-value dollars. Top Openers provide the average opening weekend gross, and Top Closers the average final gross.
Not surprisingly, the bottom half of the Forbes Top-10 tend to appear in the top half of the Marquee Stars appraisals owing to larger salaries paid to actresses in higher profile films. Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway offer the best balance between cost-return and box office prominence.
Wolves in the Number Cruncher’s Hen House
Commentary by Team Tao Jonez
Posted: October 5, 2009
Bigger Picture Research recently featured Lifting the lid on studionomics - an insightful discussion by Dr. Jim Barratt about the famous Goldman rule that “nobody knows anything.” The article points out that the screenwriter laureate’s axiom was intended to underscore Hollywood’s inability to reliably predict the success or failure of any specific film. A former Head of Research & Statistics at the respected UK Film Council and now author of Bad Taste about Peter Jackson’s debut feature (Wallflower Press, December 2008), Dr. Barratt further affirms: “Goldman’s observation is unarguably true, and the reasons are plain enough. For one thing, film resides at the intersection of art and commerce, where our understanding of common-or-garden market economics is unsettled by the ineffable vagaries of creativity on the supply side, and audience whim on the demand side.”
As is usual at Bigger Picture Research, apt expression reflects cogent comprehension.
We at Marquee Stars completely concur with Dr. Barratt. We side with Goldman for the numbers debate. Our Package Calculator, for example, has never performed better than 70% predictive of actual film performance outcomes and only within a very narrow range of assumptions and maximal margins of error. (The calculator is actually intended for the limited function of comparing the relative box office strengths of different package combinations.)
Star Power Ratio Analysis
2 October 2009
The below ratio statistics identify the inner workings of star power, often revealing undervalued performers and new rising stars. The BO (Box Office) Quotient provides a proximal indication of the average revenues impact of promotional moneys spent on a marquee star’s pictures. The GO (Gross-to-Opening) Ratio measures the average volume of ongoing business, or “legs,” for a star’s pictures. Art market stars tend to build higher GO Ratios owing to the nature of platform release patterns. Still, these ratios provide an alternative look at marquee strength by deemphasizing the marketing impact of high concept.
Our Marquee Appraisal System
The Calculation behind the Package Calculator
A few factors affecting motion picture profitability
Even in today’s speed-of-lightning information age, content executives and filmmakers still spend many crucial hours of their professional lives weighing the advantages of this over that prospective motion picture package (the combination of producer, story, director and stars). Yet how does a sensible decision-maker decide which movie stars to seek, which package to “greenlight” or which finished film to acquire without losing sight of the financial bottom line?
A MarqueeStar Is Born
HOLLYWOOD - In the beginning Vaudeville created the theater circuit. And Edison invented the film projector. But the celluloid heavens were dull, and without life, so Hollywood concocted movie stars. And has commanded them forth globally ever since…
Today Marquee Stars SM proudly presents our Marquee Appraisal Guide SM - an innovative approach to charting the headliners who power the cinematic universe. Apart from the traditional surveys of panel audiences (Nielsen Company), or of industry sales people (Forbes Star Currency, UlmerScale), or of departing moviegoers (CinemaScore), or of set-top viewers (TNS), or of website clickers (STARmeter), or of movie reviewers (Celebrity Tomatometer), or of online gamesters (Hollywood Stock Exchange) - each of which provides its unique perspective - our Marquee Appraisal Guide ranks brand name film talent based fundamentally on direct financial criteria: e.g. their adjusted opening weekend average (OWA) and adjusted average world gross (AWG).
“Brilliant,” you may be thinking. “But that’s just obvious.”
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World's Favorite Films 2010
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World Favorite Foreign Language Films 2010
Yip Man 2 (Chinese)
My Name Is Khan (Bollywood)
Nodame Cantabile 2 (Japanese)
Blood Brothers: Secret Reunion (Korean)
L'arnacoeur (French)
Doraemon: Mermaid Adventure (Japanese)
Little Big Soldier (Chinese)
La rafle (French)
Io, loro e Lara (Italian)
Liar Game (Japanese)
Our Rossiya (Russian)
Younger Brother (Japanese)
Housefull (Bollywood)
Harmony (Korean)
Go Lala Go (Chinese)
Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf 2 (Chinese)
Chico Xavier (Portuguese)
Kandahar (Russian)
