Well, so much for a sub-250 ratio being impossible.

Snakes on a Plane 1628, $6,361,000, 255.93
Material Girls 544, $1,722,863, 315.75
Accepted 366, $3,715,350, 98.51

All in all, a good Friday for Yahoo. All in the right ranges.

Invincible - Glory Road had 190.50, Coach Carter had 353.45 with whole day on the front page, and Friday Night Lights 113.60. Invincible seems more about the adult audience and less about urban, so should be closer to FNL. 120.

Beerfest - R-rated comedy traditionally has a very high ratio. Grandma's Boy had 546.72, and Harold & Kumar had 335.90, but the theater count for Beerfest is much better. 200-250.

Idlewild - ATL 284.89, Hustle & Flow 216.49. Ray was at 123.01, but it had way many more theaters. Should be in the 200 range even with the current trend.

How to Eat Fried Worms - not an animated film or rated G, and low count, so I expect a ratio closer to what Hoot and Zoom had. Around 200, depending on the grade.

Beerfest 3, +3, C+
How to Eat Fried Worms 1, +1, F
Idlewild 1, +1, B-
Invincible 13, +13, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2800, +0, B+

Don't know if Invincible started with zero review. Shouldn't matter much by the end of the day. Didn't catch LMS' initial number either, but don't think the tracking will be useful anyway; just for fun.

Dont think it started with 0 since theres two written reviews from March.

Beerfest 7, +4, C+
How to Eat Fried Worms 3, +2, C- (up from an F-)
Idlewild 2, +1, B+ (up from a B-)
Invincible 15, +2, B+

Beerfest 7, +4, C+
How to Eat Fried Worms 3, +2, C-
Idlewild 2, +1, B+
Invincible 15, +2, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2800, +2, B+

I think we'll have at least one tank job today, and Yahoo! is accurate at indicating those.

Beerfest 10, +3, C+
How to Eat Fried Worms 6, +3, D+
Idlewild 3, +1, B+
Invincible 15, +0, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2803, +3, B+

Idlewild, the big breakout with all those advance tickets sold isn't doing much so far.

It's clogged and probably has 8-12 reviews right now. Of the 4, it should pick up most tonight, but I agree it's off to a very slow start.

Beerfest 10, +0, C+
How to Eat Fried Worms 7, +0, D+
Idlewild 4, +1, B+
Invincible 16, +1, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2803, +3, B+

Clogged. Projected reviews are as follows:

Beerfest: 18-24
Worms: 24-32
Idlewild: 18-24
Invincible: 24-32

Can someone please explain this to me? I used to come on this thread, and once in awhile on a "busy" night, people would say yahoo was clogged. Lately I feel like I read that statement every two seconds. But the odd thing is, it seems to be happening even in the early morning now (when West Coast hasn't even started airing the films). I know its true, because I can see the reviews really dribbling in, but why is yahoo getting clogged so much more than before? And technically, what is "glogging?" That the site isn't updating the counts because they are coming in too quickly? That doesn't seem right with so few (even anticipated) reviews coming in this early in the morning.

In short (too late), "Huh?'

Even Yahoo movies has been slow or down for the last hour. I'm going to bug the hell out of them until they get it working right.

Yahoo! reviews is down for a second consecutive hour. We will need to proportionately lower all of the ratios tonight to account for this.

I was told this morning that engineers were working to resolve various issues with Yahoo! Movies. Maybe they weren't lying?

The hourly tracking will never be as useful for early projections as before. The overall numbers at different points of the day can still be suggestive to how a film is doing. With ratios in a disarray, I think comparing the numbers between movies, taking the expected difference in ratios, will be much more telling than the raw numbers. So instead of doing 650/130 = 5.0, we'll say "Invincible has more reviews than Beerfest, but its ratio is expected to be half, so it's doubling the latter in term of Friday gross."

I agree. We may even want to consider devising ratios based on the written reviews, as those never "clog". This will be starting from square one again, though, and may not be nearly as accurate as the overall reviews have been.

Stupid Yahoo and its clogging

They need to get their act together.

Finally, some actions:

Beerfest 28, +18, B- (up from C+)
How to Eat Fried Worms 34, +27, C (up from D+)
Idlewild 35, +31, B+
Invincible 40, +24, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2827, +24, B+

Pretty much expected grades all around.

The links are still generally unresponsive, which may render Yahoo! useless today, outside of a relative comparison POV.

dolce, the clogging became evident when the number of written reviews almost matched or in some cases exceeded the number of overall reviews after an immediate hourly update. We're currently experiencing this kind of mathmatically impossible situation. Also, while it's true that the pace in early hours tends to be slower than the rest of the day, before the clogging, the consistency in term of how many reviews per hour was actually quite amazing, to the point where we can make decent projections on the entire day's numbers very early on. Horlicks on HSX did that when writing his Friday article each week and found the accuracy (over/under on the price before the 10am PST halt) to be around 80%, better than any prediction or tracking articles. Basically, if a film started out slow, it normally won't recover, no matter how much a night film one is as people want to argue. But now, it's very hard to get a sense of the pace except for regarding to each other.

Also, when it clogs, we are sometimes able to project the number of actual reviews by multiplying the written number times 4, 5, or 6 (generally). This works fairly well, but there have also been some really odd ratios of written to overall ratios, ranging from as low as 1:2 or as high as 1:10. It's hardly precise, but it gives a ballpark range when things are plugged up.

From Yahoo:

"Engineers have confirmed your site issue. Although we cannot offer you an estimate as to when this problem will be fixed, we are currently investigating the issue in order to find a solution. Be assured that we are working to restore full functionality to Yahoo! Movies as soon as possible."

Beerfest 79, +51, B (up from B-)
How to Eat Fried Worms 91, +57, C- (down from C)
Idlewild 149, +114, B- (down from B+)
Invincible 77, +34, B+
Little Miss Sunshine 2878, +51, B+

Beefest

Idlewild is doing fine though, come on breakout!