1995 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 were -

The film not on this list that performed best over the summer was "Casper," which made $98,969,245.

And the winner is John Oswalt, with 81 points. Mr. Oswalt hit "Die Hard With a Vengeance" right on the numbers, predicting its $99 million gross. He was also extremely close on "Waterworld," and (clearly) not very far off on anything. He correctly predicted the success of "Casper," as well, though he would have won even had he predicted a different film as the sleeper.

Here are the complete results.

  • John Oswalt* 81
  • Jeffrey S Bathurst* 65
  • Adam Villani* 63
  • Chris Dugger 55
  • Marshall Freund 53
  • Paul Michals* 51
  • Alex Fung* 50
  • Brian Markenson 44
  • Jordan Chodorow 42
  • Albert Yu 39
  • Mike Brown 38
  • Mike D'Angelo 38
  • Winnie Tung 35
  • Julio Gagne* 31
  • Thomas Skogestad 28
  • Joshua Kreitzer 27
  • Scott A. Hutchens 20
  • Matthew H Lu 17 An asterisk indicates correctly choosing "Casper" as the sleeper film.

    I did fairly well this year in predicting what would be successful. My list of six films contained six of the top seven films of the summer, with only "Casper" missing. There's a decent chance that eventually "Mortal Kombat" and "Dangerous Minds" will make more than some of the films on this list, but not during the summer.

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

    Thanks to all who entered.

    Back to the film contest page.

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