so what is your take Termi? 7-8 mill OD? What do you think?

yeah i definitely think it will at least crack $7million, with a damn good shot at $8

the showing i went to at 7pm was damn near sold out, just a couple rows in the very front had some empty seats.

I think a 7-8 mill OD will shock the industry. Most people were saying about an 8-10 opening weekend when they first heard about it last year. Then a 20 OW once the trailer came out. Then it was 4-5 OD. With the crowd reports, it could double the most optimistic of our predictions. I'm hoping for 7.5-8.

me too, i hope rocky gets close to 8 million and shocks the world. the underdog is defying the odds again!

Gotta get up in 4 hours, so I'm signing off, but man...WHAT A FILM...can't believe he did it. I'm so happy tonight.

Talk to you later Termi.

me too! i've been smiling ear to ear practically ever since i got out of the theater! g'night!

Here's my last update for the night

540 (+11) A-

Night folks

ROCKY! ROCKY! ROCKY!

2319 ratings as of 11 PST with 2 updates left

Using a very very high ratio of 300, we still have a $7.75 million day.

I think $8m is pretty much gauranteed.

I compiled some crowd reports in this thread
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479143/boa ... d/61764997
Seems regional in some areas but otherwise its very good for a weekday

8 million looks possible

Looks like we missed the 12:30 am PT update. As of 3:10 am PT, Rocky has:

576 written (+36), A-. There are still only 2319 ratings, so it's been clogged since at least 11 pm PT, for the last 4+ hours.

Distributing the additional 36 reviews equally, it's a pace of about 8 an hour, so it looks like it should have been around 556 writtens at 12:30 am PT.

At a ratio of 55, that's $10m, a ratio of 65 is $8.6m, a ratio of 75 is $7.4m, a ratio of 85 is $6.5m, and a super super high ratio (although these written ratios are rather new) of 100 would be $5.5m.

Take your pick from the numbers above, based on whatever coincides best with screen reports and other data, in your view. Or we could just wait for Wed numbers in the afternoon...but what fun is that?

notfabio reports $1,322,113 from roughly 410 theaters. Using their 4-5x formula, that'd be about $5.3-6.6m, but he said that could be a conversative number.

Sounds like he's being too conservative to me, since even the high side of that range would be at least an 85+ ratio, and I just don't see it going that high.

You never know, but I wouldn't think that Rocky's ratio would be much higher than Eragon's (and would initially have guessed that it would be lower), especially on a Wednesday. Does anyone know how a Wednesday opening compares to a Friday, for reviews and ratios (can be traditional ratios, just looking for the comparison, whether higher or lower ratios on a Wednesday).

Another thing as well. This is a very eclectic audience...old, young, black, white, everything. I don't think 50 year old men and women are going to run home and write a review about it on line at 1 AM. I think 8 mill sounds about right. You can't ignore things like moving the film to a bigger theater because of the brisk business, and the sell outs and the cheering. I think he i sbeing much too conservative.

I'm going with a final ratio of 65 (a little less than Eragon) and an $8.5M Wednesday. Let's hope it comes true!

I think the 6 mill is still too conservtive.

The average projection multiplier from 12:30 is currently 6.0 (for PG films), which would have been dead on yesterday. That would have put my 5-day forecast in the $28-31M range. I went with 7.5, figuring its pace would increase in the late hours. Man, hindsight sure is 20/20 and second-guessing is so easy.

How does the projection multiplier work? You mean at 12:30 pm during the day, you multiply by 6 to project the final reviews at 12:30 am when it closes 12 hours later?

Exactly. I had it working well under the traditional system, and I hope to do the same with the writtens. There's just not enough data yet, unfortunately. The traditional projection trends don't translate nearly as well as the ratios, so I'm starting over from scratch. I guess it's easy for me to say I should have plugged in the average value for Rocky after the fact.

Rocky's ratio was about 87. Major ouch. Under the traditional system, it would have been over 360! What happened??? I can't believe this had more fanboys than Eragon, unless many of the reviews were fake.

Well, it does appear that many of the reviews were fake, for whatever reason.

Having the average shown as F for a long time could have caused some extra votes and contributed to the A- average after it's fixed.

Also, it's not surprising that many would choose to review this movie especially given the history and nature of it.

There's a group of people that don't want to see this thing because they can't get over Sly being 60 and making a Rocky movie.

People went to see it and either were pleasantly surprised that it was a good movie or confirmed in their preconceptions. It's not your normal movie where you know what to expect. I think that accounts for more reviews since people are compelled to comment on it.

We grossly underestimated the amount of motivated reviews (real or fake) this would get. A raw overall total of 2300 is a red flag, and I believe we would have been clued in to this had Yahoo not been clogged 90% of the day. Thankfully, all of tomorrow's openers should (theoretically) behave "normally". We don't have any sequels, no hyped fanboy films, and hopefully nothing that will be needlessly trashed on the Internet. I've been doing my HW today and will hopefully have some realistic ratios for tomorrow.

Being the holidays, I'll post the starting ratios early to get some feedback for tomorrow.

I'm going with 12 for both Night at the Museum & We Are Marshall.

Comparison films:

The Holiday - 8.56
The Pursuit Of Happyness - 12.40
Unaccompanied Minors - 12.85

Something along the lines of the bottom two sounds about right. We may need to adjust the ratio throughout the day if it comes out of the gate strong.

And for The Good Shepherd, I think 22 looks about right.

Comparison films:

Turistas - 24.52
Blood Diamond - 19.64

Blood Diamond is the better comparison, but taking the average is the safe bet.

Feedback is not only welcome, but encouraged.