Friday, May 04, 2007

Boffo vs. Da' Bums - The Summer Has Begun (REVISED)

Revision - While looking at this summer's release schedule, I've decided to tip the scales for the Dodgers a little bit. If you read this before, there's some new math at work.

After the rousing success of Abes vs. Babes, Spy vs. Spy, and Brown vs. The Board of Education, we at SoSG have decided to link up two of the summer's greatest pastimes - Dodgers Baseball and the Box Office. Our team of SoSG statisticians put together a matrix so complicated, even to describe it would short circuit your soul. (Actually, it's total runs scored by the Dodgers, multiplied by 3.5) Here's a sample from summers past to help you along.

Weekend Top movie Wkend gross ($MM) Dodgers’ runs scored Runs x 3.5 multiplier Wkend winner
May 5-7 MI3 $47.7 4,5,10 (19) $66.5 Dodgers
Jun 2-4 Break-Up $39.2 6,8,4 (18) $63.0 Dodgers
Jun 30-Jul2 Superman Ret $52.5 6,2,0 (8) $28.0 Movie
Jul 21-23 Pirates 2 $35.2 0,1,1 (2) $7.0 Movie
Aug 18-20 Snakes on a Plane $13.8 3,14,5 (22) $77.0 Dodgers

Sidenote, as I'm writing this, 24 just featured an (offscreen) sex scene that lasted seven minutes of real time. Including post cloitus cigarettes and getting makeup back on.

Back to the business at hand. SoSG's own Rain Man-ish Steve Sax wanted to clarify some points about Boffo vs. Bums.

Although the average summer weekend was $49.2 and the average dodgers runs scored was 16.2 (for a multiplier of 56.7), it would SEEM like the Dodgers should win more than average. However movie grosses and Dodger runs are so bipolar that anything can happen, every weekend; and in fact, with a 3x multiplier, the Dodgers would have won 10 of 17 weekends last season--a decently fair fight. This year, the Dodgers have fewer offensive weapons, while the box office is more stacked than a Victoria's Secret catalog, so an adjustment is in order.

With Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Rush Hour 3, Harry Potter, Shrek the Third, Transformers, and Lindsay Lobrow's Georgia Rule coming out, the Dodgers are going to have to work that much harder to stay competitive with Tinseltown. At the end of every weekend, the Dodgers will be compared to the top weekend grosser. Any questions about the rule can be sent to someone.

PREVIEW - This weekend, two box office behemoths will be battling with Blue. A small art house film (Spider-Man 3)and the thrice-postponed timely poker romantic drama Lucky You. At 12:40am, after mistakenly attending the 12:41am screening, the Delino sat through all 140 minutes of Spider-Man. Taking a page from the Batman Returns playbook, SM3 featured more villains than the Bengals and Yankees combined, including a less hammy Green Goblin, an underused Venom, and that guy from Wings. The effects are AMAZING - sand has never looked more menacing or alive. Spider-Man's evil costume is a fun plotline, even if the writers opted not to go with the original "Secret Wars" story from the comics (if you know what that means, make sure to thank your mom for use of her basement). But after the sheer brilliance of SM2, the Spider franchise has gotten a little... ordinary. Still good. Still worth my ten bucks more than once. Yet the complicated effects doesn't necessarily add tension or drama. And the movie veers into the most bizarre twenty minutes you'll ever see in a comic book movie. If you blinked, you'd swear it was some kind of early Ben Stiller Show bit.

Meanwhile, Lucky You's misguided attempts to pass itself off this year as a romance instead of the poker drama it was supposed to be in 2005, along with the fact that DREW BARRYMORE's HEAD NEVER STOPS MOVING, should keep it hovering at Nationals run production levels. The Dodgers will be facing Smoltz, Hudson, and some mediocre not even worth mentioning. Using our patented multiplier, look for the Dodgers to haul in about $35 mill (10 total runs). And the lengthy Spider-Man 3 should top out at a so-so $100 mill. Winner - Spidey.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gonna be a no brain winner for SM3 this weekend over the Blue Crew.

Delino DeShields, Sr said...

It's tricky - there's four or five GUARANTEED losses (Shrek, Pirates, Spiderman, and Harry Potter). But summer includes all the crappy August releases. So it might work out for the Dodgers. Or I might have to come up with a new scale :-)

Steve Sax said...

And don't forget:
Ocean's Twenty-Seven,
Die Hard IX,
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Super-Shiny Guy,
The Bourne Old-Olmedo, and
The Care Bears Movie.

The Dodgers better get that power bat. Or three.

Delino DeShields, Sr said...

Note new multiplier. Almost knocked it up to four, but that would mean the average boxoffice champ would be $60 mil. and that seemed high. So 3.5 it is.

Eric Karros said...

Does this mean if I go to the movies I'm hurting the Dodgers?

Steve Sax said...

No more than Wilson Betemit is.

You could always pay for Lucky You and then sneak into Spider-Man 3. Not that we're advocating that here at SoSG. Necessarily.

Steve Sax said...

Spidey 3 estimated to have grossed $59M on Friday. With the Dodgers getting shut out Friday, they are off to a bad start for the weekend.

Delino DeShields, Sr said...

Okay.

Right now, the Dodgers have three runs for the weekend. If Spidey makes $160 mill for the weekend, then all the Dodgers have to do is score about 40 runs tomorrow, and they're home free.