1994 Summer Box Office Blockbuster Contest Results

Here's the final results of the summer blockbuster contest announced about four months ago. To remind you, the point of the contest was to predict how well six big summer movies would do, and to choose the film not on that list that would do the best. The six films I chose and their final grosses (as of the end of the Labor Day week) were:

The film not on this list that made the most money was "Forrest Gump", taking in $241,017,723. No other film was anywhere close.

Contestants tried to guess the grosses of the six films as closely as possible. The closest entrant got 15 points, next closest 14 points, etc., for each film. Correctly guessing that "Forrest Gump" would blow away the other competitors was worth 10 points.

Here are the results for the 12 entrants. An asterisk indicates that the contestant correctly guessed that "Forrest Gump" would be the non-list winner.

Name Score

  • Paul David Doherty 80 *
  • Brian Dickson 69
  • Steven Chung 67
  • Patricia Daukantas 64 *
  • Scott Renshaw 63
  • Luke Domet 61 *
  • Jonathan Hodapp 59
  • Amanda Tuttle 58
  • Aman Verjee 53
  • Thomas Skogestad 51 *
  • Danno McKinnon 50
  • Sean Puckett 49

    Congratulations to Mr. Doherty, our winner by a good margin. Other than grossly underestimating the popularity of Arnie's movie, he was pretty close on all the others. He'd have won even without the boost from choosing "Forrest Gump."

    My predictions of what would do well, as reflected by the choices in my list, had their ups and downs. I completely missed "Forrest Gump," of course, and had far too much credulity in the power of sequels as far as "City Slickers II" went. "Clear and Present Danger" and "The Mask" have made slightly more money than "Maverick", but not as much as any of the other four films on the list. Four of the top five grossers of the summer are on the list, and five of the top ten. The others are "Forrest Gump"($241 million), "Clear and Present Danger" ($100 million), "The Mask" ($101 million), "The Client" ($83 million), and "Wolf" ($64 million).

    I'll put out a companion posting on how this summer went at the box office tomorrow.

    Thanks to all who entered.

    Back to the film contest page.

    reiher@cs.ucla.edu
    Last modified: Fri Sep 16 1994