Box Office Contest

Projects, websites

I’ve been in a ‘Box Office Prediction’ contest at work for several years and I’ve always found it interesting that there’s not really a site out there that will run this kind of thing for you. So I hooked up a combination of php pages with a mysql database and a php script that will pull the daily results from boxofficemojo. It’s clearly a rickety system and I haven’t worked out all the kinks, some movies don’t show up on the daily results, but those ones probably wont make the top 10 anyway.

http://www.boxoffice.swalrus.org/

Holiday Movie Contest 2009

Entertainment, Movies

Twice a year at my office the boss runs this movie contest. We all have to submit a list of what we think will be the top ten highest grossing movies of the “season”. We do one for the summer and one for the holidays. There’s a certain style in picking movies that you personally don’t want to see (ever!) but you think will perform well at the box office.

  1. Avatar – 350 million
  2. New Moon
  3. Princess and the Frog
  4. 2012
  5. Christmas Carol
  6. Planet 51
  7. Old Dogs
  8. Blindside
  9. Alvin and the Chipmunks 2
  10. Sherlock Holmes

I know there are some problems with my list. I’ve very influenced by a good trailer, I am such a sucker. I just finished watching the second trailer for Avatar and I’d watched Aliens the week before so I was on a bit of a James Cameron buzz. So I might have ranked Avatar a little high. The other problems are that I might have ranked Princess and the Frog a couple of spots higher than I should of. It’s a return the the classic Disney style of my childhood, which I’m very excited about, but I’m not sure what today’s kids are going to think of it. Do you remember when every animated movie was a musical? I didn’t even realize they stopped doing that until I saw this trailer. The third thing I missed is I should have ranked Alvin and Sherlock a little higher, the contest runs through the 20th of January… so they’re going to come in higher than 9 & 10… whoops. But you never know, some other movie could sneak in an bump them down, it’s pretty much a crapshoot.

My boss likes to do analysis of the picks and sends out weekly update emails. After searching on the web I’ve decided to post them here. This is an average office with most of the people between the ages of 30 and 50.

Breakdown of pics by movie

Breakdown of pics by movie