It's time for a little spring cleaning in anticipation of the upcoming consoles. As such, I'm going to be running some contests to start giving away some of games from my library that I don't really want or play anymore. I can't guarantee that all of these are going to be great games, necessarily, of course. Heck, some of them might be downright bad. But they'll be free, at least.
If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and there are tracking companies that are paid quite a bit to do so, but there's also a lot of luck, since almost no one is able to consistently guess a box office weekend with any degree of accuracy or precision.
So, we'll try to do these weekly until I run out of things to get rid of. The rules this week are pretty simple, but we're going to expand the game to multiple films this weekend, since it has a pretty good shot at being the biggest box office weekend of the year.
1. Guess how much money The Man of Steel's second weekend, World War Z, and Monsters University will gross. Make guesses for each of them, but be sure to add all of those guesses together on a separate line. Feel free to go down to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're guessing American box office grosses only. Here's what your prediction should look like, roughly.
- Man of Steel: $55.5 million
- Monsters University: $65.0 milliion
- World War Z: $40.5 million
- Total: $161 million
2. Make your guesses as a reply to this thread, and make sure that they're in by Thursday 6/20 at noon PST/3 PM EST/whatever crazy clock time you have in your crazy timezone. I won't count anything after that. Any post that has been edited at any time will be disqualified, and likewise if anyone attempts to delete a post and try again later. (We can see that stuff!)
3. The winners will be determined next Monday or Tuesday, when actual box office figures are released at boxofficemojo.com. Weekend estimates are often released on Sunday afternoon, but we'll wait for the real numbers to determine a winner. I'll add up the total gross of the three movies listed above and compare them to your total numbers to see who's closest; over or under doesn't matter. (I won't judge you based on individual movies, but I'm still curious as to your guesses, so don't neglect to put all of the movies in there.) In case of any ties, I'll decide between the entries with either a coin flip or some other randomized method.
4. There'll be two winners. The closest Premium member will win a copy of The Last Of Us. The closest non-Premium member will get a month of Premium access. I wound up with two copies of The Last Of Us; I pre-ordered from Amazon, but it wound up not arriving on Friday, so I just bought the download. This is a brand-new copy; it's been opened, but only because I heard the disc rattling around inside the case and wanted to make sure that it was mounted properly before I sent it out. But it hasn't even been put into a PS3! It's a virgin disc!
That's pretty much it! Go forth and prosper, or something. I'll reserve the right to change any of these rules as I see fit before the deadline, but I doubt that'll be necessary. (Don't be a dick and make it necessary, in other words.)
UPDATE WITH WINNERS:
According to Box Office Mojo, the numbers were:
| Movie | Derp |
|---|---|
| Monsters University | $82,429,469 |
| World War Zed | $66,411,834 |
| Man Of Steel | $41,287,206 |
For a total of $190,128,509. A lot of people were really, really close on this one, within a million or two dollars. But as far as accuracy goes, I'm showing that our premium winner was ThosePosers with an astoundingly close guess of $190.2 million. (And yes, I verified that this was his original guess by looking at my screenshot of the page from Thursday afternoon!) Our non-premium winner was Rudeboy217 with a guess of $190 million even.
Before I declare these results official, feel free to check my work and see if I missed anyone. (I have screencaps of all the guesses from Thursday, so don't try to get sneaky with edits or anything.) But if not, then congrats!
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