I could see those deadline hollywood numbers being correct actually. That would be low 40s for both of them.

BTW - a question for the yahoo review gurus. Could you determin a films BO % drop from the previous weekend based on % drop of yahoo reviews from week to week? Is there any correlation? (Assuming yahoo is working and clogging isnt an issue).

DH was right.

1. CASINO ROYAL SONY 3,434 14,379,000 4,187 n/a 14,379,000
2. HAPPY FEET WARNER BROS. 3,804 11,610,000 3,052 n/a 11,610,000
3. BORAT 20TH CENTURY FOX 2,611 4,876,000 1,867 -49% 81,055,000
4. STRANGER THAN FICTION SONY 2,270 2,251,000 992 -54% 18,541,000
5. SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE BVI 3,359 2,032,000 605 -62% 45,439,000
6. FLUSHED AWAY PARAMOUNT 3,307 1,572,000 475 -71% 44,821,000
7. BABEL PARAMOUNT 1,251 864,000 691 -49% 9,960,000
8. SAW III LIONS GATE 1,942 838,000 432 -62% 72,853,000
9. DEPARTED, THE WARNER BROS. 1,611 792,000 492 -51% 112,060,000
10. LET'S GO TO PRISON UNIVERSAL 1,495 702,000 470 n/a 702,000

Although we were clogged all day, the ratios would have been as expected. Based on the estimates, Casino Royale would have had 1480 reviews with a ratio of 100. Happy Feet would have posted approximately 660 reviews with a ratio of 55. Let's Go To Prison would have posted about 100-110 reviews with the assumed ratio of 150.

As of 3:30 AM PST:
Deck the Halls 0
Deja Vu 3, A
The Fountain 70, A-
Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny 0

Expansions:
Bobby 76, B+
For Your Consideration 51, B

For ratios, I have 70 for Deja Vu & Deck The Halls. 150 for Tenacious D, and 50 for The Fountain since it was already open for reviews. Wednesday openers are always a little tougher, though. I don't know if we should start tracking Bobby until tomorrow since it's only in a handful of theaters today.

Deck the Halls N/A
Deja Vu 3 (7), +0, A
The Fountain 70 (4), +0, A-
Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny N/A

I get the feeling this will be a useless day for Yahoo.

Wow has Yahoo ever fucked up this badly? Still no changes. As far as user reviews go, Deja Vu has 32 listed, Deck the Halls 76, The Fountain 22, and Tenacious D 25.

I still don't understand why they need two different systems for updating written reviews and overall numbers. It's fine with me if they turn the overall update continuous too instead of discreet.

wtfigo

What a mess today - guess we will be relying solely on ther crowd reports. Expect Deck The Halls to have a high ratio with that crappy grade.

Some likely useless projections:

Deck the Halls - $2.3M
Deja Vu - $4.4M
The Fountain - $1.8M
Tenacious D. - $1.6M

Thunder what makes you think that The Fountain is going to come in higher than Tenacious D? From NF's earlier numbers The Fountain is only doing about 66% the business TD did and TD is in 400+ more theatres. How were numbers for today at your theatre?

-Brendan

Bobby has posted well under 100 reviews today. Even with a low ratio, I expect something in the $1.0-1.3M range for today.

Current counts

Deck the Halls 578 C+
Deja Vu 678 B+
The Fountain 440 B
Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny 442 B

Projections:
Deja Vu $7
Deck the Halls $5
The Fountain: $4.5
Tenacious D: $3

So The Fountain is increasing 400% Thurs-Fri....

Yuck. I thought the ratios Rolling Thunder posted above were for friday. As they were for wednesday forget everything I wrote

Since we didn't note the totals early Friday morning, we don't have anything to base the projections on. You can be sure The Fountain didn't increase 400%, though. This was a bit of a washout weekend for Yahoo, which was alright since not many of us were around to update the numbers anyway.

A crappy weekend for Yahoo. Even if it's clogged this weekend, we should still be able to get an idea if Nativity will generate even half the interest of POTC. I don't think it will open well, but I ended up eating my words when Passion exploded two years ago.

Beautiful Thing just broke 500 votes and became the top rated film of all time at Yahoo.

I just brought this up in the Internet Tracking thread, in response to RT's comments about Yahoo reviews' growing uselessness. It's been getting worse and worse, and often you gurus here are able to adjust to it. But as last week's debacle shows, it's just getting out of hand.

However, the written reviews should still come in at a real-time pace. They seem to update every time that one gets posted. And you experts in this thread seem to not only have a handle on reviews-to-gross $ ratios, but also on written-to-review ratios. So for some movies it's a 1:3 written-to-review ratio, some 1:5, etc. If you take both the normal projected ratio and the written-to-review ratio, you'd have a new number you can use. Then just divide the writtens by that new ratio, and you would have the same projections for Friday grosses, as you normally do.

For example, in the current system, a movie gets 500 ratings and has a projected ratio of 100. So you project a Friday gross of $5 mil. If you used a written-to-review ratio of 1:5, then you would assume this movie gets 100 written reviews, and the written-to-gross $ ratio would be 20. If the written-to-review ratio were expected to be more like 1:3, then you would expect 167 writtens and a written-to-gross ratio of 33. All scenarios come out to the same $5 mil Friday gross.

At first, you would just be coming up with both a normal ratings ratio, plus an expected written-to-review ratio, then combining them for the new written-to-gross ratio. But over time, everyone would adjust, and you would just have the new, commonly accepted set of ratios (which means written-to-gross).

What do the review gurus here think? I'm no expert on this, so wouldn't be doing this, but though it might be a useful proxy for you guys who already know what they're doing.

Thanks for the post, llabb. It's obvious that Yahoo has turned a deaf ear to fixing the user review problem. As these things go, it probably stands to get worse before it gets better - IF it gets better. Therefore, we will have to adapt and devise a new methodology. Yahoo still often proves useful at the end of the day, but the clogging is an obvious problem throughout most days now. Therefore, the reasonable shift would be to devise ratios using the written reviews, which are updated in real-time. The biggest problem I see is predicting the correct written to overall ratios. Most are generally 1:5 or 1:6, except for highly anticipated or controverisal films, which could see ratios as low as 1:2. I do think the patterns have shown enough marked trends for us to be right most weeks, but it's something we'd have to work diligently at to perfect.

For the past 5 weeks, I have been using a spreadsheet forecaster for such extraploations, with inconsistent results. This is because we've had several weeks where the final review totals aren't available - in other words, Yahoo never "unclogs". Therefore, there hasn't been enough data to provide a constant baseline, even though I assume 1:6 for the majority of films. So what's been happening is that I've been guessing the incorrect extrapolation on top of trying to pin down an accurate ratio.

If Yahoo doesn't fix itself soon, we will have no choice but to solely go by the written reviews, which is essentially what we've been doing lately anyway. I'd say we've actually done quite well (with a few misses), which one could argue is no worse than the initial system of using the raw number of reviews.

Exactly, it's pretty much what you guys have been doing anyway. Using the writtens and the screen reports to guesstimate just how clogged it is and how many overall reviews there are "supposed" to be. So you're using writtens to estimate another figure, to estimate another figure (gross $). Seems rather odd, as it adds a further degree of separation/uncertainty.

If the Yahoo review gurus started using new written ratios, it would be off for a little while, but adjust pretty quickly. You wouldn't even think, is it a 1:4 or a 1:6 written-to-review ratio anymore. You would just be thinking, movie X is about a 20 ratio, and movie Y is about a 30 (written-to-gross Fri $).

Anyway, just something to think about, and perhaps try starting this week, for those of you gurus who are interested.