Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

WEEK 13 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

So Week 13 ended up having a simple solution: 3 screens of Doctor Strange and 5 screens of Arrival. In retrospect, this should have been a pretty obvious choice. Arrival is showing it’s legs and still getting great word of mouth, even if I didn’t think it was all it could have been. Doctor Strange is staying relatively strong even though Fantastic Beasts should be eating into its numbers. Hacksaw Ridge is still outperforming estimates, but just not enough to justify being in any good box offices for last week. I think it will be out of Perfect Cineplex contention for a little while until its Oscar Buzz heats back up.

Another interesting number to look at this weekend is Almost Christmas‘s strong $5.7 million dollar gross. It has been rising in $ per bux over the last few weeks and may continue to outperform as we all get farther into Christmas mode. If you’re not the type who wants to see Bad Santa 2, this will be the movie for you, and judging by the number of bad reviews for the sequel, there’s going to be a whole lot who fit that type.

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

WEEK 12 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Chris called it. I didn’t. This week’s perfect cineplex was the very simple 1 screen of Fantastic Beasts and 7 screens of Moonlight. The worst part? That I’ve been calling it for weeks. “If Moonlight is over 350 theaters, it’s a shoe-in for best performer,” he said repeatedly. Then, when it breaks that it would top 700 screens I get cold feet and bail. Well, the problem wasn’t with Moonlight, it was with the Harry Potter spin-off.

I knew that Fantastic Beasts didn’t have the steam of its big brother movie. I did the research, read reviews, and put my finger on the pulse of the American movie-going public. (Ok, so I really asked around to my biggest Harry Potter nerd friends.) Mix that with bad early Thursday preview numbers and I switched to 4x Trolls, 1x Arrival, and 3x Moonlight. See? I still belived a little big.

The actual worst part is that I wasn’t even wrong about Fantastic Beasts. It underperformed, yet somehow was still the best value even with a cost north of $800 bux. Yet this weekend showed heavy losses across the board compared with the Veteran’s Day haul that it didn’t even matter. If anybody had some crow I think it’s time I tried some.

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

WEEK 11 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Let’s get this out in the open. I’m a fan of hard workers, not lazy people who don’t even bother to fill out a whole cineplex. Really it only takes 8 clicks to set a lineup, and this week we’re going to AWARD people who only picked 7 movies with the Perfect Cineplex? If I weren’t so competitive I would boycott this site in a heartbeat. Except I wouldn’t because this is one of the highlights of my week now.

Trolls may anchor this lazy-man cineplex, but we can all see Hacksaw Ridge is doing the heavy lifting here. Mix a little bit of Veteran’s Day synergy with a whole lot of positive audience and critic scores, and you get a top performer bonus 6 times over in the Perfect Cineplex. Having seen it myself, I feel like this movie will play out a lot like American Sniper, so look for it to make appearances in or near top cineplexes possibly into 2017. As for the next few weeks, my gut tells me that this will be a little overpriced. Long legs are good, but the mid-term seems to be when the value goes down for movies like this.

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

WEEK 10 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

I know we all had a big decision to make this week, and I hope when it came down to it you made the right one and overlooked the consensus pick, because at this point we all know that the one with the weird hair pulled it off.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Trolls has managed to overtake the mammoth Dr. Strange to grab top performer and anchor the perfect cineplex for week 10.

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

Week 09 did not go as well for me as my Week 08 Madea prognosticating. Was I smart to get off the Boo! train while it was hot? (Spoilers: No. I am not a smart man.) Let’s start off with a breakdown of last week.

WEEK 09 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

How could we all be so dumb on Halloween/Diwali weekend? If you went purely by calendar based selections you’d have 7/8 of your perfect box office spelled out for you. Add in a dash of The Accountant and there you have your perfect cinema for week 9.

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

I may not have won in Week 08, but with my first moderately successful article out, my Week 06 demons are behind me and it feels like ole’ Jake is back on top again! Let’s start off with a breakdown of last week.

WEEK 08 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Did you trust the mumu and go all in on Tyler Perry? As the over-performer of the season, you weren’t going to sniff the top spot without at least 3 screens of Boo! A Madea Halloween. Who would’ve seen that coming?

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Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.

Catch a full recap of Weeks 06 & 07 on episode #49 of the podcast.

After my Week 06 meltdown, I felt the usual pang of fantasy misfortune that serves as the stick that keeps us setting our cineplexes up to reach the proverbial carrot: the Perfect Cineplex.

WEEK 07 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

You didn’t need the brain of Ben Affleck’s title character to see the math behind the Week 07 perfect Cineplex:

Week 07 perfect Cineplex

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