Weekend prediction: The Broken Hearts Gallery
September 10, 2020
With theaters slowly reopening in North America, albeit with significant capacity restrictions, and new releases returning to theaters after a long, lonely, Summer, we thought it was time to take a look at our weekend predictions. Traditionally, these have been compiled through a combination of research and judgment, much like the predictions you’ll see on many web sites, trade publications, and newspapers. While our predictions have always stacked up well compared to everyone else, going forwards we wanted to do something that more closely embodies the ethos of The Numbers: providing objective, data-based analysis of the movie industry.
I’m pleased to announce our new weekend previews, which will be based on a model we’re developing that uses our huge database of movie box office and metadata to predict the weekend box office for movies currently playing in theaters. The prediction model debuts this week with an analysis of Sony’s The Broken Hearts Gallery, and we’ll be refining and expanding the model and predictions over the weeks to come.
Before I get to the analysis for Broken Hearts, here’s a quick overview of what’s included in the model right now, and the thinking behind leaving a few things out for now.
The core of the model is a film “comp analysis” that uses films that match the new release based on our film classification system, which categorizes films based on source, creative type, production method, genre and MPAA rating. (You can see this system in action in our market charts section.) Broken Hearts Gallery is an original screenplay, contemporary fiction, live action, PG-13-rated, romantic comedy, and the first step in the analysis is to find wide releases that match those criteria. The 11 most recent such films are listed below.
Having compiled this list, we use the average opening weekend among the comps as a baseline for our prediction. In the case of this type of romantic comedy, the average opening is about $12 million in 3,072 theaters. This number is then adjusted using two factors.
First, we adjust for the number of theaters the new film is playing in. Broken Hearts is opening in 2,204 theaters, per Sony’s report this afternoon, which is 28% less than the average for this type of film (a number that is largely a reflection of theater closures due to the pandemic). So the theater count adjustment reduces the prediction by 28%.
Second, there’s an adjustment based on the current state of the pandemic. This is something of a rule-of-thumb adjustment right now, because very few films have opened in wide release since theaters started up again, and the situation around the country is very fluid. Based on what we’ve seen so far from films such as Unhinged, The New Mutants, and Tenet, the pandemic adjustment is currently set to -60%, meaning that we expect that films would make about 40% of their normal box office if they were to play in a normal number of theaters. Note that this adjustment is on top of the theater adjustment. Basically, we’re assuming that if a film is playing locally, about 40% of its normal audience is likely to go see it, and the theater closures and restrictions are further limiting business. These two adjustments are added together to produce the final prediction for a movie.
I cannot stress enough that the pandemic adjustment is highly speculative and based on a small sample of movies. I considered not releasing the model at all until we had more data to go on, but in the end decided to put the findings out in public and refine things as we go. This is partly, to be honest, because we will need months of data to really fine-tune this part of the model, and may never be able to do so, given the fluctuations in the severity of the pandemic, and the reaction of moviegoers, local and state governments, and the distributors to the situation. Because we are splitting out the pandemic adjustment as a separate, final step in the calculation, you are welcome to use your own factor and run your own calculations if you think our model is over- or under-compensating.
There are a couple of factors that are waiting in the wings and likely to be used on particular movies in the future: a seasonal adjustment that will come into play as we get closer to the holidays; and a Bankability adjustment that uses our Bankability values to adjust for the quality of the cast and crew in a given film. I’ll have more to say on those as and when we use them.
There’s much more to talk about, and I’ll discuss further aspects of the model over the weeks to come. For now, here’s what the model is saying about the opening weekend for The Broken Hearts Gallery.
As always, I welcome your feedback—just click on my name below to fire me an email—and look forward to seeing how the model does and fine tuning it over the weeks and months to come.
Filed under: Weekend Preview, The New Mutants, Tenet, The Broken Hearts Gallery, Unhinged