Summer Movie League – Spidey Continues the Summer Trend

Week five of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is over, and once again the top billed picture of the week doesn’t quite live up to the forecasts.

Which isn’t to say Spider-man: Far From Home did poorly.  $93 million is nothing to sneeze at.  But, again, the forecasts for the three day weekend were closed to $120 million.  Is there a slump going on here, or is Hollywood just too optimistic?

Of course it was also a goofy week if you were concentrating on the three day box office.  We had the Independence Day holiday on Thursday, so many people, including myself, took Friday off to make it a four day event.

To take advantage of that, both new films this week, Spider-man and Midsommar, opened earlier in the week, with Midsommar live on Tuesday and Spider-man opening with midnight showings once the calendar turned to Wednesday.  That spread out the opening totals beyond the weekend.

That also meant that what would normally have been the Thursday night previews, which count towards the Friday totals, went missing.  Spider-man, over five days, hit new heights world-wide for the franchise, but in the restricted world of FML that only cares about the three-day weekend, things were less buoyant.

And so the perfect pick of the week was anchored on three screens of Toy Story 4, while Saturday was the best performing day for Spider-man.

I actually set my lineup before the decision about whether or not previews would count, opting for Friday as my anchor and when I saw the red banner on FML saying that there would be no preview dollars I thought about changing to Saturday… but then forgot until it was too late.

Still, at least I talked myself out of going all-in on Midsommar.  That turned out to be something of a bust.  With the Saturday estimates it was the worst performer for the week, which in this league actually gives it a $2 million bonus.  It lost that position on Sunday, but regained it for the final tally, keeping a Midsommar heavy lineup from being a complete disaster.

All of which left the scores for the week looking like this:

1. grannanj’s Cineplex – $119,426,550
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $103,263,624
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $103,095,404
4. Goat Water Picture Palace – $100,200,869
5. Too Orangey For Crows – $99,333,806
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $97,351,254
7. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $96,220,963
8. Conical Effort – $96,063,499
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $91,443,890
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $91,053,408

For the first time this season the perfect pick was different for the TAGN league than for the standard rules.  With no empty screen penalty 3x Toy Story 4 and 3x Aladdin with two empty screens was the TAGN perfect pick, worth $135 million, while with standard rules the perfect pick was 3x Toy Story 4, 2x Aladdin, and one each of Avengers, Rocketman, and Godzilla, worth $132 million.

However, nobody got the perfect pick in the TAGN league.  Grannanj secured first place by anchoring on 3x Toy Story 4 but fell short of perfect on the filler.

The rest of us anchored on some variation of Spider-man, with Po Huit getting the gambler award for going all-in on Midsommar with just a single Friday screen of Spider-man.  The worst performer bonus kept that pick somewhat viable.

That left the top ten overall season scores looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $492,063,874
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – $432,993,702
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $424,210,899
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $412,022,265
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $402,023,165
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $400,870,204
7. Joanie’s Joint – $378,485,651
8. Conical Effort – $365,338,852
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $342,066,684
10. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $306,532,223

The week was big enough that there were a couple of position swaps, but not big enough for any radical change.  My big lead from last week stayed intact.

And then there is the alternate scoring for the season, which is starting to spread out a bit.

1. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 42
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – 37
3. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 29
4. Too Orangey For Crows – 28
5. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 26
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 25
7. grannanj’s Cineplex – 19
8. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 18
9. Conical Effort – 17
10. Joanie’s Joint – 14

The alternate scoring is also starting to deviate from the overall scores some.  At least there were no ties this week.

So there we go, week five done and on to week six.  The lineup for that is:

1. Spider-man: Far From Home – $588
2. Toy Story 4 – $258
3. Stuber – $213
4. Crawl – $204
5. Yesterday – $98
6. Aladdin – $80
7. Annabelle Comes Home – $63
8. Midsommar – $43
9. The Secret Life of Pets 2 – $39
10. Avengers: Endgame – $20
11. Men in Black International – $24
12. Rocketman – $23
13. John Wick 3 – $19
14. Child’s Play – $8
15. Godzilla – $6

It is an off week, with no blockbuster landing in theaters.  It is also an odd week in that no titles dropped off the lineup.  Spider-man contracting to a single pick opened up two spots that were filled with the two new titles this week, Stuber and Crawl.

Neither of those are going to be big, given their opening week positions at third and fourth place.

I have seen a lot of ads for Stuber, though nothing that made me want to run out and see it.  It is what I would call a “Friday night film” at our house.  I have been trying to make a tradition out of watching something silly, stupid, or outrageous if we are at home watching a movie on Friday.  My wife isn’t all-in on that, but sometimes I can make it happen.  Anyway, I don’t have much to say about the movie itself, so I’ll borrow the premise line from the Wikipedia article:

A mild-mannered Uber driver named Stu picks up Vic, a grizzled detective who is hot on the trail of a sadistic, bloodthirsty terrorist. Stu soon finds himself thrust into a harrowing ordeal where he has to keep his wits, avoid danger, and work with his passenger while maintaining his high customer service rating.

With lots of advertising but no real star power behind it, the long range forecast is calling it at around $17 million.  But the forecasts have been over-optimistic pretty much all season, so you have to wonder about that.

Crawl, on the other hand, I only saw as a preview for The Dead Don’t Die.  It is an entry in the… umm… environmental action horror genre maybe?  It is Florida, a hurricane is coming, the flood waters are rising, alligators are wandering around town, and something horrible is in the crawl space under the house.  And, because it is Florida, somebody didn’t evacuate.

Again, no big star power and not as much advertising as Stuber, but it has the horror/disaster aspect that is always good for some box office.  The long range forecast puts it at $15 million, though that number is down considerably from when it started getting tracked.  It seems risky unless it gets some buzz.

So do you even bother with either of these films in your lineup?  Everything else on the list besides Spider-man is starting to age.  My Monday evening gut pick was 1x Spider-man, 1x Toy Story 4, 2x John Wick 3, and 3x Godzilla.  That seems safe, if not inspired, and spends the full $1000 budget.

I tinkered with anchoring on 4x Crawl, but I am not convinced it is worth the risk.  So I keep messing about with other options.

The league locks tomorrow night, so get your picks in.

Summer Movie League – With a Whimper

And so it goes, week fourteen, the final week of our summer Fantasy Movie League is done.

And with that we have but to tally up the scores and declare the winner.  The choices for the final week were:

Crazy Rich Asians     $460
The Meg               $204
Mission: Impossible   $143
Operation Finale      $133
Christopher Robin     $116
Searching             $111
Happytime Murders     $108
Alpha                 $97
BlacKkKlansman        $92
Mile 22               $89
Kin                   $82
Incredibles 2         $62
Ya Veremos            $56
Hotel Transylvania 3  $49
A.X.L.                $44

And none of them really shook expectations, save for The Incredibles 2, which turned out to be the best performer for the week.  To answer last week’s question, I guess it is kids who go to see movies on Labor Day.  Or maybe not.  CRA still topped the box office.

I vacillated on picks over the course of the week.  On Monday I was in with 4x The Meg and 4x A.X.L. as my pick.  Come Friday morning I was spooked by some optimistic predictions and jumped on 7x Operation Finale and 1x The Incredibles 2.

But on Thursday morning my mind was set on 3x The Meg, 2x Alpha, and 3x The Incredibles 2.

Summer Movie League – My Week Fourteen Picks

As it turns out, even with no bonuses in the TAGN league, that was my best scoring pick.  It also wasn’t a bad pick overall.

The perfect pick for the league was a bit better, but not a ton better.  Three screens of The Meg appeared to be the best anchor when it came down to it.

Summer Movie League – Week Fourteen Perfect Pick

The thing is, this was a week without a huge winning or losing pick.  Everybody who picked this week ended up within a $11 million band of choices, which wasn’t enough to dislodge many people for their spots in the ranking.  The scores among those who were in for the final week looked like this:

1. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $68,033,788
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $67,688,509
3. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $65,327,962
4. Too Orangey For Crows – $61,869,121
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $61,846,280
6. Goat Water Picture Palace – $59,840,549
7. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $59,840,549
8. Joanie’s Joint – $59,840,549
9. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $59,840,549
10. grannanj’s Cineplex – $58,819,921
11. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $57,381,443

Only eleven people picked this week.  Vigo led the pack anchored on The Meg, while I was just behind with the same anchor but different filler.  Then Ben with a heavy bet on Mission Impossible, Bhagpuss with CRA as his anchor, and Miniature with and anchor on The Meg and Mission Impossible.

After that there was everybody who went with seven screens of Operation Finale, less Grannanj, who had a CRA anchored lineup.  That left the final scores for the season looking like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $1,233,260,784
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $1,192,800,479
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,168,442,901
4. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $1,099,917,789
5. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $1,068,381,300
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $1,053,023,190
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $1,050,270,086
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $1,046,285,672
9. Too Orangey For Crows – $1,012,717,545
10. Joanie’s Joint – $1,012,254,458
11. grannanj’s Cineplex – $1,003,319,433
12. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $996,001,692
13. I HAS BAD TASTE – $890,174,972
14. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $743,497,331

The narrow gap between first and last this week meant not much change, with the first eight spots a duplicate of last week.  Bhagpuss snuck back into the top ten by virtue of acing out Joanie by a hair and due to Po being out of town and not picking.

So there it is, the final score.  Corr takes the crown for the summer season!

And that is it for the summer blockbuster season.  As usual, it starts big but loses steam before Labor Day.  Look for another post in a bit about the updates for the Fall season.  Yes, there will be a Fall season.

Summer Movie League – The Mediocre Muppet Caper

Our summer Fantasy Movie League is coming to a close soon as we are now through week thirteen, the penultimate week of the season.

I like the word “penultimate” and will use it every chance I get.

For week thirteen we had the following choices for our lineups.

Crazy Rich Asians     $318
Happytime Murders     $264
The Meg               $201
Mile 22               $129
Mission: Impossible   $127
Christopher Robin     $106
Alpha                 $102
BlacKkKlansman        $84
A.X.L.                $58
Hotel Transylvania 3  $45
Slender Man           $40
Mamma Mia 2           $35
Ant-Man and the Wasp  $29
The Equalizer 2       $28
Incredibles 2         $27

Crazy Rich Asians was still slated to take the top spot in its second week, but second place was expected to go to Happytime Murders, with The Meg coming in third.

I was not enthusiastic at all for Happytime Murders however.  As I said in league chatter, to me it seemed like a picture in search of an audience.  The clips and trailers, along with the R rating, were pushing it as an adult feature, so you couldn’t expect too many kids going to see it.

But even with Melissa McCarthy at the helm it looked like a rip-off of homage to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film with a PG rating back in the 80s, done with muppets rather than animation.  Or puppets rather, as muppets are a registered trademark of the Disney corporation.  The film was clearly trying to ride on that association however, along with children’s television with the tag line “No Sesame, All Street,” for which they were sued by the Children’s Television Workshop.

So I was staying away from that.  I was also down on A.X.L. which, despite its low threshold for success based on its FML pricing, seemed trite and uninspired.

At the beginning of the week I was keen on CRA and my Monday Hot Takes League saw me anchor on two screens of that along with some filler that was mostly picked to spend my budget and avoid A.X.L.

As the week went on though, I began to feel like CRA wasn’t going to do it, that to be worth that price it would have to have an almost unprecedentedly small drop in earnings week over week as to be unlikely.

I decided that since I could get three screens of The Meg for less than the price of two screens of CRA that I would go with sharks for my anchor.  So I ended up with 3x The Meg, 1x Mile 22, 2x BlackKklansman, and 2x Hotel Transylvania for the TAGN league pick.

Summer Movie League – My Week Thirteen Picks

That wasn’t a bad pick.  I did okay for the week.  But if I had just stuck with my Monday pick I would have won the week in the TAGN league because CRA only dropped 6% week over week, which was just the sort of unprecedented result that was needed to justify the price.  Anchoring on two screens of CRA was the path to the perfect pick.

Summer Movie League – Week Thirteen Perfect Pick

While I failed to get on board with CRA, at least I didn’t go with Happytime Murders which, in addition to confused marketing and poor reviews, also fell into third place overall for the week behind The Meg.  And that wasn’t because The Meg was suddenly on fire, but because Happytime Murders just didn’t have the draw.

On the other hand A.X.L. did okay, at least based on its FML pricing.  It ended up just about where it needed to be so if you used it as a filler item it didn’t drag you down.

Thus the week ended up with scores looking like this:

1. Joanie’s Joint – $71,400,125
2. grannanj’s Cineplex – $70,978,648
3. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $70,706,218
4. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $62,887,75
5. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $60,735,430
6. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $60,084,033
7. Too Orangey For Crows – $53,041,276
8. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $49,660,699
9. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $42,582,979
10. Goat Water Picture Palace – $42,550,095
11. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $40,224,039
12. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $39,238,157

Joanie won the week, their first win of the season, though grannanj and Vigo were close behind.  All three of them anchored on a pair of CRA screens.  After that we get into people who anchored on The Meg.  Corr had four screens of it, Ben had two, and I had three.  Go figure.

After that Happytime Murders start figuring in lineups, dragging them down, though SynCaine went all in on Mile 22, so stands out in the pack in that regard at least.

That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $1,175,879,341
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $1,125,111,970
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,108,602,352
4. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $1,034,589,827
5. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $1,000,347,512
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $993,182,641
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $988,423,806
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $986,412,699
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $974,990,413
10. Joanie’s Joint – $952,413,909
11. Too Orangey For Crows – $950,848,424
12. grannanj’s Cineplex – $944,483,300
13. I HAS BAD TASTE – $890,174,972
14. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $707,708,993

Corr widened his lead against Goat and myself, though I was able to reclaim second place from Goat.  Vigo jumped up several spots on a strong performance and Joanie pushed Bhagpuss off of his hard earned tenth place spot with their week winning finish.

Now we are headed into the fourteenth and final week.  While Corr has first place locked, Goat and I are still battling over second, while fifth position still could change hands as well.

To get there we have the following choices.

Crazy Rich Asians     $460
The Meg               $204
Mission: Impossible   $143
Operation Finale      $133
Christopher Robin     $116
Searching             $111
Happytime Murders     $108
Alpha                 $97
BlacKkKlansman        $92
Mile 22               $89
Kin                   $82
Incredibles 2         $62
Ya Veremos            $56
Hotel Transylvania 3  $49
A.X.L.                $44

Falling off the list for the final week are Slender Man, Mamma Mia 2, The Equalizer 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  I am a bit surprised that The Increadibles 2 held on for another week since it was the bottom pick for week thirteen.  Pixar magic I guess, as it has made the cut twelve weeks running now.  That is no Black Panther run, but it is damn good.

New this week are Operation Finale, Searching, Kin, and Ya Veremos, none of which I had heard of until I started working on this post.

Operation Finale follows the story of the Israeli abduction and trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1960.  This tale has been done before as The House on Garibaldi Street , The Man who Captured Eichmann, Eichmann, and Operation Eichmann.  The latter stands out in my mind especially since it featured Werner Klemperer as Eichmann and John Banner as Rudolph Hoess, roles made somewhat surreal due to their characters on the show Hogan’s Heroes.  I remember seeing it on TV at one point and not being able to tell if it was serious or not for quite a stretch due to the actors and how they played it.

Operation Finale was pegged at about $7 million on the last long range forecast I saw, though it was trending upward.  It should be at about 1,800 theaters in the US.

Searching is a thriller starting John Cho, of whom I am a big fan, about a father whose daughter is kidnapped and as the police find no leads he goes off after her, following her digital footprint.  A technological Taken maybe?  I don’t know, but there is no long range forecast for it, so maybe not at the Liam Neeson scale.  It is supposed to be in 1,100 theaters, expanding from just 9, and is in its second week so won’t get any boost from Thursday night previews.

Kin is… well… I will let the ad copy spell it out:

Armed with a mysterious weapon, an ex-con and his adopted teenage brother go on the run from a vengeful criminal and a gang of otherworldly soldiers.

So we have that.  It was called at $5 million on the latest long range forecast and was estimated to be in 2,100 theaters.

And then there is Ya Veremos, a Spanish language film, with no long range forecast either.  While it has done very well in Mexico foreign language films are always a bit of a wildcard here.

On top of all of that, we have a holiday weekend coming up in the US.  Viva Labor Day and all that.  Time to put away the white shoes.

That means this week fourteen is a four day haul, Friday through Monday, and the forecasts I mentioned above were only for the first three days.  Forecasts and results always get messed up on these weeks, a situation made all the worse by this being the final week of the season.  You are pretty much on your own this time around as the forecasts won’t help much.

Meanwhile, the new season starts the following weekend, so there will be a busy transition as this season wraps up a day late while the new season starts.  Expect two posts, but the new season post might be on Wednesday with the old season results showing up on Thursday.  There are only so many hours in the day to write this stuff.

Also, the plan for next season is to return to the default FML rules, including screens locking at 9am Pacific Time on Fridays, so you’ll have an extra day to pick in the hope that fewer people will forget.  If you have any thoughts on next season leave a comment here or in the FML Chatter group for the league, which is where we are also talking about scoring alternatives.

But this season still is still going, though it effectively closes on Thursday at 9am, so you have less than 24 hours to make your final picks.  Go do them!  Now!

My Monday Hot Takes picks are currently 4x The Meg and 4x A.X.L., but you know I’ll change my mind by Thursday.  I am trying to figure out who goes to the movies on Labor Day weekend.

Summer Movie League – Crazy Rich Alpha

We are done with what I referred to as the penultimate penultimate week of our Summer Fantasy Movie league.  The way the calendar worked out this season has 14 weeks, so people who thought we only had one more week to go are going to have to suffer a bit longer than expected.

Meanwhile, this week 12 was another example of how you don’t need a big blockbuster release to get ahead, you just need to believe in a title that exceeds expectations and pricing.  The options were as follows:

Crazy Rich Asians      $358
The Meg                $356
Mile 22                $296
Mission: Impossible    $193
BlacKkKlansman         $129
Christopher Robin      $128
Alpha                  $89
Slender Man            $84
The Spy who Dumped Me  $61
Mamma Mia 2            $56
Hotel Transylvania 3   $55
The Equalizer 2        $51
Ant-Man and the Wasp   $43
Incredibles 2          $39
Dog Days               $23

Despite having been let down by long range forecasts for week 11 I chose to pay attention to them yet again for week 12.  Unfortunately, despite the concept of “once burned, twice shy,” there are not a lot of other options when trying to figure out what a film is going to do.  And the long range forecasts for the week 12 releases was pretty bearish, relative to the pricing.

The best of the lot, when viewed through that lens, might have been Mile 22, and I wasn’t keen on betting heavily on Mark Wahlberg.  Just a personal preference.  Alpha seemed okay.  The range of estimates was pretty wide for it, and it didn’t seem to have much media presence.

And then there was Crazy Rich Asians which got a lot of press and had a lot of people talking, but estimates were all over the map and it was opening on Wednesday, so there would be no Thursday night previews to boost its weekend take.  The Meg would have to drop a lot for CRA to be worth the extra two bucks in pricing.

For my Monday Hot Takes pick I wasn’t buying in on any of the new releases, going with 2x The Meg, 1x The Spy Who Dumped Me, and 5x Ant-Man and the Wasp.

I wasn’t wed to that lineup, but I couldn’t think of anything better on Monday night.  And so I swapped my picks around a lot more than usual over the course of the week, including a couple of times going with the winning pick of the week, 1x CRA and 7x Alpha.

But then CRA only did $6 million on its opening night, which didn’t seem like much relative to the buzz, while The Meg did $5 million the night before.  $5 million on a Tuesday night seemed like a sign of strength, so I started making lineups with enough slack in them that I could swap out CRA and The Meg.  But I wasn’t believing in Alpha at all and, by the Thursday morning lock I had to decide between CRA and The Meg and went with The Meg mostly because I knew Corr was going with CRA and I wasn’t going to catch up with him going with the same pick.

I ended up with 2x The Meg, 1x Alpha, 5x The Incredibles 2.

Summer Movie League – My Week Twelve Picks

Friday morning, before the other leagues closed, the Thursday night previews for Mile 22 and Alpha showed up, $1 million for the former and half that for the latter.  Those were low numbers for the anticipated box office, so I swapped out Alpha for Slender Man in the remaining lineups while Corr ditched his Alpha heavy lineup.

That was a bust.  As priced Alpha needed to do about $5-6 million to be worthwhile and the previews made $4-5 million seem more likely, and then it went an did $10 million for the weekend, making it the best performer and a necessary addition to any competing lineup.

That put it ahead of the more expensive BlacKkKlansman and Christopher Robin and up with the twice as costly Mission: Impossible.  The only redeeming virtue of my lineup this week was that at least I had one screen of Alpha in it.  The perfect lineup for both leagues with and without bonuses was 1x CRA and 7x Alpha.

Summer Movie League – Week Twelve Perfect Pick

That left the week’s scores looking like this.

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $98,977,724
2. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $98,977,724
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $98,977,724
4. Too Orangey For Crows – $80,239,775
5. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $72,383,222
6. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $70,569,026
7. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $64,164,636
8. Joanie’s Joint – $62,948,980
9. grannanj’s Cineplex – $60,011,452
10. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $59,303,508
11. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $57,488,433
12. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $55,077,460
13. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $45,600,034

At least 13 people remembered to pick this week, up from 10 last week.

Corr, Ben, and Goat all had the perfect pick this week, while Bhagpuss got to fourth through packing in five screens of Alpha.

After that things start to fall off.  Darren pulled off 5th place betting heavily on Christopher Robin plus a screen of Alpha.  Meanwhile Po’s mixed luck continued to haunt him.  While he got in four screens of Alpha, he anchored on two screens of the modestly performing 22 Mile and had two screens of the worst performer of the week, Dog Days.  Dog Days was in 16th place, behind Jurassic World, which was dropped from the list for this week.

And then there is me holding the bag, anchored on two screens of The Meg.  That 7th place finish, and my second poor week in a row, hurt my prospects for the season.

That left the overall scores looking like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $1,112,991,590
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,066,052,257
3. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $1,065,027,937
4. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $973,854,397
5. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $947,174,542
6. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $945,840,827
7. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $943,521,942
8. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $934,766,374
9. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $929,641,294
10. Too Orangey For Crows – $897,807,148
11. I HAS BAD TASTE – $890,174,972
12. Joanie’s Joint – $881,013,784
13. grannanj’s Cineplex – $873,504,652
14. Kraut Screens – $689,378,141
15. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $670,782,009

Corr is now solidly in first and pretty much has to forget to pick at least one of the two final weeks to be in jeopardy.  Goat pulled into second place, though they are less than a million ahead of me, a gap narrow enough that either of us could end up in second.

Ben’s performance put him into a solid fourth place this week.  I don’t think he can make it into second or third, nor do I think he is likely to be displaced from fourth unless he fails to pick.  Fifth place however looks to be the hot spot, with possibly five people in contention.

So now we are on to week 13, the real, actual penultimate week of the season, and here are our choices.

Crazy Rich Asians     $318
Happytime Murders     $264
The Meg               $201
Mile 22               $129
Mission: Impossible   $127
Christopher Robin     $106
Alpha                 $102
BlacKkKlansman        $84
A.X.L.                $58
Hotel Transylvania 3  $45
Slender Man           $40
Mamma Mia 2           $35
Ant-Man and the Wasp  $29
The Equalizer 2       $28
Incredibles 2         $27

Dropping from the list this week are the poorly performing Dog Days as well as The Spy who Dumped Me .

Replacing them on the list are The Happytime Murders and A.X.L., and for once of late I was actually aware of both movies before they showed up.

The Happytime Murders has been all over the web, especially in my Twitter feed.  It comes in the vein of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit and Cool World where there is a crossover between humans and, in this case, the muppet-like puppets. (It is directed by Jim Henson’s son after all.)  I assume it will use the darker side of the lives of puppets as its primary humor vector.  After all, the tag line is “Sex. Murder. Puppets.”

While I like Meslissa McCarthy, who stars in the film, I’d have to see something a lot more appealing that has been shown so far to put it on my list of movies to see.  The long range forecast… and those haven’t been treating me well of late… has this coming in at around $14 million, while the FML pricing this week says that somebody believes it will do less than CRA in its second week.

And then there is A.X.L., which I saw as a “coming soon” trailer before The Increadibles 2 earlier this season.  My thought then was, “this is dumb.”  The main plot, as the trailer presented it, was a teen finds a robot dog and decides to keep it, but the evil corporation that built it wants it back.  Trite, silly, and dumb.

The last long range forecast for A.X.L. has it under $2 million.  It being in 9th position at that forecast points to this likely being a fairly weak week for the box office.

Given all of that my Monday Hot Takes league pick was 2x CRA, 1x The Meg, 3x Mama Mia 2, and 2x The Incredibles 2, based largely on the fact that it spent $996 of my $1000 budget.

As usual, the league locks less than 24 hours after this post goes live, so make your picks soon.

Summer Movie League – Gonna Need a Bigger Lineup

Week eleven of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is in the can and it was the sort of week that people long for, one where a film or two exceeds expectation allowing for a big score relative to the pack… if you make the right picks.

While we are past the blockbuster portion of the summer season, this past week looked like one on which an astute pick or a gamble might let a lucky player climb up the ranks.  The choices were as follows:

The Meg                 $334
Mission: Impossible     $260
Christopher Robin       $177
Slender Man             $171
BlacKkKlansman          $84
The Spy who Dumped Me   $83
Dog Days                $69
Mamma Mia 2             $65
The Equalizer 2         $63
Hotel Transylvania 3    $62
Ant-Man and the Wasp    $52
The Darkest Minds       $38
Incredibles 2           $41
Teen Titans GO!         $31
Jurassic World          $29

Last week when I was finishing up the week ten post I felt that Slender Man was the wild card for the week.  It was based on what is now a well known meme, horror movies always surprise me, generally doing much better than I expect, it didn’t have much competition on the horror front, and the box office projections for it were all over the map, running from $9 million to $25 million.

All of that seemed to indicate that it could do well… or not… which pretty much defines a wild card.

For my Monday Hot Takes league picks though I was not willing to risk it.  I went conservative, running with 3x Mission: Impossible, 2x The Equalizer 2, and 3x Teen Titans GO! for my pick.

The other possible wild card was Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, for which there was no long range forecast and no projections on Monday night when I was writing and doing my first round of picks.  It was priced by FML with the expectation that it could run to about $5-6 million, about half of what they seemed to be calling for Slender Man.

And then there was The Meg, which didn’t seem like much of a wild card at all.  Its long range forecast numbers had been sinking week after week, so that by Monday night it seemed like a toss-up as to whether it would out-perform Mission: Impossible, the latter going into its third weekend.

And I could see why projections for The Meg might be modest.  While not running with a statistically valid sample size, nobody I asked knew what The Meg was about.  I had to look it up myself on Monday night to get the brief on it.  And when I did read up on it, I wasn’t all that impressed by the idea of another shark movie in a world where the Sharknado series, set to release the sixth and promised last installment in the franchise, seemed to have sucked all the oxygen out of the shark tank.

I mean, I love me some Jason Statham, but I wasn’t sure he was going to be enough to carry The Meg very far given my perceived obstacles.

So I did my Monday night picks and felt I needed to keep an eye on Slender Man to see if it was going to hit the high end of expectations or not.  That was the anchor to which I was expecting I might swap.

The movie news sites seem to be past their summer box office obsession now that the blockbusters have passed as well.  It wasn’t until Wednesday that Box Office Pro showed up with some forecasts, and they only deigned to call a top five rather than the ten they were doing earlier in the season.

But in that top five there was BlacKkKlansman estimated at $12 million, ahead of Slender Man, which was only in for $10 million in their estimate.  If true, that made the Spike Lee film very much under-priced and a very likely candidate for the best performer of the week.  It was also clearly going to be the filler of choice, delivering the most box office for the buck.

They were less enthusiastic about The Meg however, calling it at just shy of Mission: Impossible, the latter expected to top the week.

So I swapped by lineup around, going with 2x Mission: Impossible, 5x BlacKkKlansman, and 1x Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Summer Movie League – My Week Eleven Picks

Box Office Pro tends to be a bit optimistic on its calls, so I felt that my other plan, 1x Mission: Impossible, 7x BlacKkKlansman might not be optimal for a league with no best performer bonus.  However, that pick went to all my other leagues.

That is where I left things until I saw the Thursday night preview estimates pop up on Twitter.  Actually, I only saw one estimate before lock time for all of the other leagues, the estimate for The Meg, which was $4 million.

That seemed like a lot.

There is always the question as to how much one should value the Thursday night previews, with talk of multipliers between 5x and 8x depending on a range of factors.  But I was thinking that if Mission: Impossible did $6 million in its preview and topped $60 million, then The Meg was most certainly going to get well past the meager $20 million forecasts.

And so, minutes before the final lock, I swapped all my still unlocked leagues to 1x The Meg and 7x BlacKkKlansman.

And then, of course, The Meg did $45 million for the weekend, more than double Mission: Impossible.  Warner Bros. did a last minute social media campaign that helped lift it past modest projections.  The Meg was the way to go, with the optimum pick for the league being 2x The Meg, 3x BlacKkKlansman, 1x The Incredibles 2, 1x The Darkest Minds, and an empty screen!

Summer Movie League – Week Eleven Perfect Pick

A perfect pick with an empty screen is a pretty rare bird, so it isn’t surprising that nobody went for it, and only two people were on board with The Meg, leaving the scores for the week looking like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $121,319,505
2. Goat Water Picture Palace – $97,034,466
3. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $97,034,466
4. Joanie’s Joint – $90,687,957
5. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $81,631,751
6. Too Orangey For Crows – $78,904,468
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $74,657,452
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $73,483,913
9. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $68,495,990
10. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $55,706,528

Only ten people got their picks in for the week, which I think is a new low.  Ah well.

Corr won the week, with Goat and I tied for second with the same pick.  The tables were turned from last week, when Corr and I different in lineup only on the main anchor.  I chose right that time, going with Mission: Impossible over Christopher Robin.  This time he got the anchor right.

Meanwhile Po, who went with The Meg as anchor as well, was pulled down by betting heavily on the under-performing Dog Days. which was in seventh spot for pricing but ended up in twelfth for box office.

Slender Man, while about spot-on for the price, was not a good option in the face of two over performing titles.

The scores for the season now look like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $1,014,013,866
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $1,000,863,301
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $967,074,533
4. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $900,240,793
5. I HAS BAD TASTE – $890,174,972
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $886,033,509
7. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $874,876,673
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $874,791,320
9. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $874,563,834
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $864,197,348
11. Joanie’s Joint – $818,064,804
12. Too Orangey For Crows – $817,567,373
13. grannanj’s Cineplex – $813,493,200
14. Kraut Screens – $689,378,141
15. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $641,653,028
16. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $639,347,136
17. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $611,478,501
18. aria82’s Cineplex – $605,936,381

I am going to have to go back and note, for the final season scores, how many weeks people missed.  The cut to make the list this week was $600 million.  Next week I think it will be $700 million.

Last week I was $10 million ahead of Corr.  This week he is now $13 million ahead of me.  Again, we can see how quickly that close of a lead can change, though it does require the leader to make a mistake, so I am depending on Corr to blow it if I am to have a chance.

All of which brings us to week twelve of the season, the choices for which are:

Crazy Rich Asians      $358
The Meg                $356
Mile 22                $296
Mission: Impossible    $193
BlacKkKlansman         $129
Christopher Robin      $128
Alpha                  $89
Slender Man            $84
The Spy who Dumped Me  $61
Mamma Mia 2            $56
Hotel Transylvania 3   $55
The Equalizer 2        $51
Ant-Man and the Wasp   $43
Incredibles 2          $39
Dog Days               $23

This week sees Jurassic World, Teen Titans GO!, and The Darkest Minds fall off the list.

Coming in we have Crazy Rich Asians, Mile 22, and Alpha.

Crazy Rich Asians, another comdey-drama, this time set at a rich wedding in Singapore. It leads the pack in pricing this week, though only by a hair. The last long range forecast has it running at about $15 million for the week, though it has been trending up. Either somebody thinks it is going to do significantly better than that or they think that The Meg, priced two dollars less, is going to drop precipitously from its $45 million week eleven opening. In addition, Crazy Rich Asians opens today, so there will be no Thursday night previews to pile onto the weekend total, but we’ll be able to see how it does on its opening night before the league closes.

Mile 22 is Marky Mark back as an action hero. There is also John Malkovich in it as well.  Mark Wahlberg always strikes me as a stand-in for a real action hero, like he is somebody you go with when your first choice isn’t available.  But might just be me.  Anyway, this is supposed to be the launch of a new action franchise, if the film does well. Long range forecasts had it at $18 million for the weekend, which I guess either means that such forecasts aren’t really worth mentioning or that the people who do FML pricing have better sources than I do (most likely the latter), because it looks like somebody thinks it will only do 83% of what Crazy Rich Asians will make over the weekend.

And then there is Alpha, a prehistoric tale of a boy and his dog. Seriously. It is about an ice age hunter who befriends a wolf. Early estimates put it in for around $7-10 million.  That puts it awkwardly in the crowded high end filler section.

Which leaves me trying to decipher the FML late summer pricing strategy. Last week FML got it badly wrong on two films, and while they have given BlacKkKlansman the usual over-perfomers pricing punishment I cannot figure out the plan for The Meg.

If The Meg drops 60% from its opening, which would be a big drop, it still lands at around $27 million, which is more than any estimate I can find for Crazy Rich Asians. Is The Meg a one-week-wonder, destined to collapse completely? I don’t know, but for my Monday Hot Takes picks I wasn’t inclined to believe that, so I went with 2x The Meg, 1x The Spy Who Dumped Me, and 5x Ant-Man and the Wasp. File that under “things that make sense on Monday night.”

But now it is Wednesday morning and the league is going to lock in less than 24 hours so be sure to go and make your picks.

Summer Movie League – Still Incredible

Week six of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is in the books now.

This past week saw yet another film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit the screens as Ant-Man and The Wasp opened up on Friday.  That left the weeks choices looking like this:

Ant-Man and the Wasp      $804
Jurassic World            $267
Incredibles 2             $229
The First Purge           $201
Sicario 2                 $89
Uncle Drew                $71 
Ocean's 8                 $48 
Tag                       $34
Won't You Be My Neighbor  $23
Deadpool 2                $20
Solo                      $13
Hereditary                $12
Sanju                     $11
Avengers: Infinity War    $11
Superfly                  $6

Ant-Man was clearly called to dominate the box office, something that was never in dispute.  But when you’re filling up eight screens and have a limited budget there are more factors in play.

Also on the list was The First Purge, the fourth installment in that franchise, which felt a bit over-priced to me.  Also, as I noted in last week’s post, it opened on Wednesday, so for FML purposes it wouldn’t even get a boost from Thursday night previews, as it previewed on Tuesday night.  Priced where it was, so close to The Incredibles 2, I felt it was a non-starter.

So the choice of anchor seemed to me to be between Ant-Man, Jurassic World, and The Incredibles 2.  Estimates for the latter two were pretty close, putting them near $30 million each, at which point my back of the envelope calculation indicated that Ant-Man would have to get close to $96 million to me a worthwhile anchor.  That was above the high estimate for the weekend, which was $88 million.  So unless somebody was really underestimating Ant-Man, it wasn’t a viable pick.

And in the match up between Jurassic World and The Incredibles 2 I felt that the price advantage of the latter, which would let me spend more on filler, overcame any box office advantage the former would present.  Estimates were far closer than the price difference on that chart.

Back on Monday night I was all-in on 4x The Incredibles 2 as my anchor.  Even after the Thursday night previews came out on Friday morning showing Ant-Man doing pretty well, I stuck to my picks in other leagues while many jumped onto Ant-Man at the last minute.  In the MCats league, which locks Friday morning, those who picked The Incredibles 2 in the TAGN league changed on the preview news.

On the filler front I wavered.  On Monday I was all for 4x Deadpool 2, not knowing that the film was facing a steep drop in theater count.  It disappeared from my local AMC multiplex for the weekend.  I guess I will wait for it to hit cable.

Eventually I settled on 4x The Incredibles 2, 1x Ocean’s 8, 3x Hereditary, a lineup that spent exactly $1,000, something that probably holds too much sway over me.

Summer Movie League – My Week Six Pick

And after the lock it was time to watch the weekend unfold.

Ant-Man did $11.5 million in Thursday night previews, which was pretty good.  It needed to do about 8.5x that to own the weekend.  Meanwhile the ticket pre-sales were being compared to Spider-Man: Homecoming, which did $117 million its opening weekend.

But Ant-Man ain’t no Spider-Man.  Arachnids own insects and after all of that Ant-Man managed a very respectable, but not exactly blockbuster, $76 million for the weekend.

Meanwhile, The Incredibles 2, which had been neck and neck with Jurassic World in the daily box office all week long/  They pulled ahead for while, but ended up in third place, just $250K behind the higher priced dinos.  That made The Incredibles 2 the anchor to have, with the perfect pick for the league looking like this.

Summer Movie League – Week Six Perfect Pick

The First Purge, having gotten its initial wave of fans earlier in the week, came in fourth with $17.3 million.

All of which left the scoring for this week at:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $122,517,418
2. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $122,410,754
3. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $121,768,961
4. Too Orangey For Crows – $121,369,556
5. Kraut Screens – $106,794,508
6. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $104,134,469
7. grannanj’s Cineplex – $100,033,084
8. aria82’s Cineplex – $96,458,682
9. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $95,301,183
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $94,323,075
11. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $94,323,075
12. Joanie’s Joint – $94,225,854
13. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $93,752,566
14. I HAS BAD TASTE – $93,574,053
15. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $86,308,838
16. Goat Water Picture Palace – $86,308,838
17. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $986,730 (did not pick)

The four at the top of the list were the four that went for four screens of The Incredibles 2 as their anchor.  Nobody got the perfect pick, but with the right anchor choice the four of us were not far off of that number.

The next four were people who favored dinos as an anchor.  Then there were the people who anchored on Ant-Man.  And, finally, Goat and SynCaine, who both went with four screens of The First Purge.

Oh, and Pak, who didn’t get home in time to pick.  That has been a problem this season.  While I have seen a change in picks from people, based on what they pick in other leagues that lock on Friday, the Thursday morning lock, along with the new multi-league picking interface, is causing people to miss picking.  I dropped a couple more people off the board as they had missed three weeks in the season.  And so it goes. (If you got dropped and want back on, let me know.  I just don’t want anybody to feel set upon because their score is way down the standings.)

This left the season totals looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $603,065,595
2. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $590,348,451
3. I HAS BAD TASTE – $587,819,013
4. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $579,764,517
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $579,222,560
6. Kraut Screens – $568,801,026
7. Goat Water Picture Palace – $567,210,010
8. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $554,031,284
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $551,941,723
10. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $547,327,977
11. grannanj’s Cineplex – $533,347,159
12. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $532,241,910
13. aria82’s Cineplex – $512,780,141
14. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $495,971,483
15. Too Orangey For Crows – $489,786,891
16. Joanie’s Joint – $478,589,151
17. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $477,878,801

As I noted last week, you don’t have to be number one for the week to get ahead, you just have to do better that those ahead of you. Corr and I both managed that and, while he got the win for the week, I managed to jump into first place overall.

With that over, we are now looking at week seven and some new choices.

Hotel Transylvania 3        $523
Skyscraper                 $394
Ant-Man and the Wasp       $387
Incredibles 2              $201
Jurassic World             $174
The First Purge            $111
Sorry to Bother You        $74
Sicario 2                  $45
Ocean's 8                  $40
Uncle Drew                 $38
Won't You Be My Neighbor   $30
Tag                        $21
Three Identical Strangers  $16
Whitney                    $14
Deadpool 2                 $11

After a few static weeks where we didn’t lose many films, this week saw a purge of a third of last weeks options. The Avengers: Infinity War, Solo, Hereditary, Superfly, and Sanju all got the chop.

Replacing them are Hotel Transylvania 3, Skyscraper, Sorry to Bother You, Three Identical Strangers, and Whitney.

Hotel Transylvania 3 is the big opening this week. Summer time is big for kids movies, as we have seen with The Incredibles 2. But as a franchise, Transylvania doesn’t have the clout of Pixar. In a weak week, at least as far as the summer so far goes, its projected $45 million-ish opening makes it the big dog. If you run with it as your main anchor you can only have a single screen, but you’ll have lots of room for filler.

I suppose is says something that a film featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is playing second fiddle to Transylvania. Skyscraper, the previews for which give me a Die Hard vibe for some reason, doesn’t have horrible reviews. It is in the zone with Tag and Transylvania. But I don’t think anybody is going to be fooled into thinking it is anything for than a vehicle to show The Rock doing crazy things on an exploding building. I’m pretty sure I’ll watch it when it hits cable. But for its launch tracking has it at $35 million or so, not a blockbuster, but well into the “good for just normal movies” zone.

Sorry to Bother You, as with the next two pictures, has already been available in limited release and is making the list due to an expansion of their theater count. Sorry brought in $725K last week across just 16 theaters, making it the top per screen earner. While critically acclaimed it does strike me as a bit of a blue state feature, and its pricing seems to indicate that FML does not see it going past $7 million for the weekend. Still, a lot of good buzz makes me wonder if it might exceed expectations.

Three Identical Strangers is a documentary… a strike against any Summer film right there most days of the week… about triplets separated at birth who later are reunited. Again, out for a couple weeks now in limited release, it is expanding.

Whitney, the Whitney Houston biopic, should have been on the list last week, as its earnings would have put it ahead of Solo, The Avengers, Hereditary, and Superfly. (There should have at least been a Best of the Rest option last week, though that is hindsight speaking.) This week it is down in the 14th slot and its value depends a lot on whether or not it will see an expansion in its theater count. Still, it is ahead of Deadpool 2, which I expect will see a further collapse in its theater numbers this week.

So what do you go with? Is Ant-Man really going to drop more than 50% in its second week, as the pricing seems to indicate? Is Hotel Transylvania 3 going to be able to stake out enough of the kids market to make The Incredibles 2 tumble this week? Does The Rock have more draw than forecasts allow?

My Monday Hot Takes league pick this week was 4x The Incredibles 2, 1x Sorry to Bother You, 3x Ocean’s 8. I strongly suspect I will change that before Thursday.

And, as I always say this season, picks lock in less than 24 hours from when this post goes live, so go make them now!

Summer Fantasy Movie League – Now With New Rules!

The time of transition is here.  Our Spring Fantasy Movie League ended yesterday and the final scores were posted earlier today.  Now the Summer League is upon us, a time for new picks, new deadlines, and new rules.

Thanks to the changes that FML made earlier this year, leagues can go their own way.  Going with my whim and the results of a poll I posted l two weeks back, the TAGN league will be departing for the FML default to charts its own path.  I give you the summer season!

The rules for the season, as you can probably guess from the graphic above, are:

• No bonuses – Raw box office take only
• Early lock – Thursday at 9am Pacific Time

The early lock will keep people from being able to pick based on the Thursday night previews that are usually available before the standard 9am Friday lock time.  It will also keep the final theater count out of the running, since that usually doesn’t finalize until Thursday around noon Pacific Time. (New arrivals usually have a theater count before then, but you might not know which older titles are going to drop theaters.)

And then there is the no bonuses thing.  People seemed in agreement on cutting out the $5 million weekly perfect pick bonus.

But I also decided to go against the grain and kill the best performer bonus, which is $2 million a screen, so capable of adding as much as $16 million to a weekly pick, as it did with the Baby Driver lineup last summer.  I can see the upside of it, but I felt a no bonus league would be better, or at least more interesting.  We shall see.

There is still a $2 million per screen penalty for blank screens, but I did not add in a penalty (or bonus) for getting the worst performing pick each week.

The hope is for there to be more volatility and variety in the picks with less time to research without leading to insurmountable scoring gaps with the absence of the bonuses.  We shall see.

So if you are up for it, let the summer games begin.

The opening week of summer, coming after the three day Memorial Weekend is a bit of a let down.

Solo                    $514
Deadpool 2              $325
Adrift                  $215
Avengers: Infinity War  $167
Action Point            $143
Book Club               $126
Upgrade                 $62
Life of the Party       $49
Breaking In             $36
Overboard               $30
Show Dogs               $25
A Quiet Place           $21
Best of the Rest        $19
RBG                     $15
Rampage                 $7

There are three new movies on the list this week, Adrift, Action Point, and Upgrade, but none of them are in the summer blockbuster league.  The best of them, Adrift, only made it to third on the price list.  Instead Solo, now condensed to a single day, tops the list for the weekend, followed by Deadpool 2.  And I feel like Avengers is a better pick than Adrift for the pricing.

At the filler end of things is almost all of the same old stuff we’ve been looking at for at least a few weeks… aside from Upgrade, which made the filler end of things in its first week.  But it might be the wild card if it does better than the $2.5 million that the long range forecast has it pegged to do.

This week’s surprising bit is the return of the Best of the Rest at $19, putting it ahead of two picks.  When Best of the Rest isn’t the cheapest pick, it always makes me wonder.  If there is some movie that they expect will be better than others already on the list, why not just put that movie on the list?  And if there is not, what justifies Best of the Rest being more expensive than RBG and Rampage.

So those are the choices for week one of the summer.

If you want to join in, now is the time.  I will put a link in the comments that you can click on to get into the league.  You will need to create an account, but that doesn’t take much.

You also have an extra day to join.  On weeks that start with a Monday holiday all lock times are pushed back a day, so the lock time for the league this week will be the usual Friday at 9am Pacific Time.  Starting next week the league picks will lock on Thursday at 9am.