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

WEEK 02 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Remember how I said I needed a dartboard to make my Week 02 picks? Apparently I need a better way to make my picks. Only 23 players had their dartboards calibrated correctly enough to land on the perfect cineplex. Let’s break down my misconceptions.

First, Kong: Skull Island wasn’t the mini-flip I projected. Instead, it put up a mighty $61 million at the box office, way more than Logan‘s $38 million. I even said that I thought the latter would beat Kong head to head. So by no means was this my most accurate week.

I called The Lego Batman Movie having a good week since it’s the only children’s movie in town. That remains true this week… to an extent. With the arrival of a certain woman-loves-bull-monster movie, we may see Lego  lose some ground to the Disney film, as long as the gay Le Fou controversy doesn’t keep some families from catching Batman and the Toy Wonder in theaters.

Finally, I thought La La Land would finally find its day in the sun with a BP bonus… but it loses yet again to the resilient Hidden Figures. This movie has incredible legs, so either audiences love the story, or they love looking at Janelle Monae, and honestly it could be both. I know locally that LSU is doing a Hidden Figures night, and I’m guessing that they’re not the only ones. This one may even find it’s 4th Best Performer bonus in Week 03.

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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 01 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Welcome to the weekly War Starts at Midnight Fantasy League Recap! Here, I aim to recap the previous week and give some hot tips on the upcoming week each and every Thursday. You can take my lineups to the bank… as long as nothing too crazy comes out in some Thursday night preview numbers.

First, let’s see what I said about The Shack in last week’s article: ” I know that even in 2,888 theaters it’s not going to make what it needs to overcome an $85 bux price tag when you La La Land  at half the price still riding an Oscar wave.” Obviously I was way off base. This film cruised to $190.3K/bux, which is one of the highest totals in recent FML history. In fact, the last film to put up more was Alice Through The Looking Glass in Summer Week 4, which is before a lot of our league even started playing! Like Alice, The Shack is a movie that I probably won’t be seeing. But that didn’t stop me from dropping it in my lineup at 6x after I saw the $800k in preview numbers.

If you did realize that The Shack was the way to go, you had to find a good anchor. Most of FML seems to have went with Get Out, and if you listen to our new review today, you’ll find out why. It’s great, and it only dropped a tiny 15.4% in it’s second week. Still averaging over $9,000 per theater, this is the movie everybody is talking about. Holding up well against a competing R release in Logan, you can expect this film to stick around in FML for a while.

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

WEEK 13 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

We all know awards season is when things get really crazy in Fantasy Movie League. I didn’t realize it was going to get crazy at the ACTUAL awards. Well, we are going to declare a winner today, and hopefully we get it right the first time. Unfortunately, no Warren Beatty to hand out the award, but he did arrive in spirit on Tuesday, and I think I speak for Chris when I say stop reading this article and go watch Rules Don’t Apply. Mostly I think we both want somebody else who can talk with us about the film, or to leave us a voicemail about it…

So, for Week 13, we saw a brain-numbing $33 million dollar opening from Get Out, smashing almost every prediction I could find online. With it’s relatively low $201 bux price tag, it cruised to an easy Best Performer bonus with $117.9K/bux. Best Picture winner nominee La La Land put in what will probably be it’s highest showing at $91.9K/bux, showing that in FML, much like real life, it’s destined to be always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

As a side note, this is easily the best 5 screens of a PC cineplex since I’ve started playing FML. It’s averaging about 5 stars per screen right now, and that’s saying something because I am the stingiest star-giver I can think of. Actually Armond White is technically stingier, but I’m going to ignore everything he has to say about Get Out because he is wrong.

For the last 3 screens we have Denzel Washington’s Fences. There goes that 5 star average. Now it’s about 4.0625/screen by my math. Viola Davis did amazing, and everything else was just a play on screen. Sorry Denzel, maybe next time.

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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

Lions aren’t just king of the jungle, and they aren’t just for when studios ask us to dream-cast remakes. They’re also the king of the FML apparently. Lion has found its way into its third perfect cineplex. Even more impressively, it’s the only 3 time BP winner EVER. So does that make this Best Picture nominee the greatest FML film of all time? If you ask this guy, it’s La La Land because I’m going to continue to pick that movie until the cows come home. Also, to those of you who scrolled down to see if it was my pick this week, welcome back and stop trying to spoil my article.

Anchoring this week’s Perfect Cineplex was, as most players expected, The Lego Batman Movie. I won’t waste words here about what I think of the movie, because all of you have listened to this week’s episode already, right? …..Right?

The last screen was the 4th appearance of Hidden Figures in a Perfect Cineplex. I’ve been catching up on all the Best Picture nominees, and I saw this film last night. I’ll say it’s good, but I didn’t love the performance from Taraji P. Henson. I thought Janelle Monae was outstanding, as she seems to be in everything. She’s about the be the female Donald Glover when it comes to my dream-casting on the show, despite her dad’s statements on the French people.

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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

Frequently when new players ask me to take a look at their lineups (hey, it has happened twice) I always end up giving them the same advice. You aren’t playing “Real World Movie Simulator”, you’re playing in the mother truckin’ Fantasy Movie League. Don’t worry about diversifying, just pour all your money into 2 or 3 movies and call it a day. They’re either going to be the most profitable, or they don’t belong in your cineplex. If you believe a movie will get the BP bonus, put every single egg in that basket. This holds true unless you’re in first place and want a hedge play on a crazy week.

This week, however, we ended with 4 movies in the PC, and for a while it looked even weirder than that. So many movies were right at the $40k/bux mark. Seven movies were within $5k/bux of the prize, with Hidden Figures and the immortal zombie Moana being the two right at the top. With Moana’s ultra-low price, it would have only taken $1,000 real world box office to make it the BP and wildly swing the perfect cineplex.

As is, the difference was so small that a some women skipping The Big Game (you aren’t allowed to say S****bowl) and seeing Hidden Figures was the demographic that made the week. As for everything else, it just ended up being this weird mix of Sing and The Founder.

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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 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Where’s that big plate of crow I need to eat? And when I do eat it, will PETA protest against it? Even if they do, apparently it won’t stop a single person from watching me eat that bird.

Yes, as much as it pains me to write it, A Dog’s Life or whatever it was called was the Best Performer this week. I assumed that when the video of the near-drowning of the German shepherd came out a few weeks ago, The Life and Death of Mr. Dog was dead in the water. Then, when the response was that the whole thing was taken out of context, suddenly Dog Time: A Time For Dogs was back at the potential number one spot.

I was so sure that this film would not do well that I called it out specifically in our last episode as the single movie that our former champion O PC, Where Art Thou? would not play in her cineplex. It’s one thing to miss on your prediction, but it’s another to specifically call out the BP as a potential flop.

All Dogs Are Reincarnated Perpetually Until The Heat Death of the Universe was joined by a movie about McDonald’s and a theater showing a blank screen, or as we call it around here, one screen of Rules Don’t Apply.

This makes me sad.

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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 07 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN

Well all of the prognosticators were wrong. If you asked anybody on Friday, they’d say for sure that La La Land  and Hidden Figures were in the showdown of the ages. The week was already wide-open, but those were the only real contenders for Best Performer this week. Now, the real contest was going to be for the fillers at the bottom half of these lineups. That was what we though on Friday at least.

It turns out the real competition was between the new horror flick The Bye Bye Man and some weird Nickelodeon Pixar knockoff called Monster Trucks. Even though The Bye Bye Man became the clear victor with $120.7K/bux, Hidden Figures, Monster Trucks, and La La Land were all within $3K/bux of each other, with the edge just going to Hidden Figures. When you add it all up, that puts the perfect cineplex at 6x Bye Bye Man / 1x Hidden FIgures / 1x blank. Even weirder than that, only 8 players found this strange combination, and none of them are even in the Top 500 for this season, and that’s AFTER you count last week.

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