Here are the final results of the 2005 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 eligible film not on this list that performed best over the summer was Wedding Crashers, which made $195,801,693. The runner up on the sleeper film was Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which made $185 million. The Longest Yard was a distant third, at $158 million. The most popular sleeper choices were Fantastic Four, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and The Longest Yard, with several picks of Cinderella Man, Bewitched, and The Island. Fantastic Four did OK, but did not approach the levels of either the winning sleeper or the next two most popular choices. Only Rick Curnutte correctly chose Wedding Crashers as the sleeper.
This year, 31 people entered the contest, exactly the same as last year.
And the winner is George Wu, with 56 points. Mr. Wu tied for the best guess on Star Wars, and picked up some points for everything except Kingdom of Heaven. Like me, he overestimated the potential popularity of the Crusades and Orlando Bloom. This year, the sleeper points did not change the winner, since Mr. Wu chose The Longest Yard. The runner-up was Jeff Vorndam, and Jeff Lau and Cathleen Reiher tied for third. (I guess all those years of Cathleen accompanying me to movies and reading Variety is paying off, in a fairly useless way, admittedly.)
Nobody hit a film's gross on the nose this year. The last couple of years, someone guessed a gross on a Will Smith summer film perfectly. I postulated last year that his presence in a summer film made that film's gross slightly more predicatably than other films. Since he didn't have a summer film this year, my hypothesis stands.
Here are the complete results, in increasing point order:
Thanks to all who entered.
I made fairly good choices this year. My list included five of the top six grossers for the summer. However, my sixth choice, Kingdom of Heaven, was a complete dud, with a very large number of films, including March of the Penguins ($70 million and still marching), coming in ahead of it. Kingdom of Heaven did a lot better overseas, but that doesn't count. Madagascar made a bit less than Wedding Crashers, but was still the sixth highest gross of the summer. Clearly, the tremendous success of Wedding Crashers was a surprise to most of us.