We are coming up on the 100th edition of This Rotten Week (this is number 92) and with my busy schedule I doubt there’ll be any time for fanfare when the big day comes around, so why not do it right now? But if you’ve got a couple of hours to kill feel free to go back and reread them all.
With no major releases this week, I thought it would be a nice time for us to look back and think about how thankful you are that I write this column every week. It’s been a while since I took stock of these predictions, and analyzing the big picture of my overwhelming critical prediction success. And with the Rotten Offices closed down for the weekend, (I gave everyone off because I’m just a good dude) let’s take a look at what This Rotten Recap has to offer.
I was going to include snazzy graphs, tables and charts, but then realized my scores mainly break down into only three categories: Awesome Predictions, Sort of Okay Predictions and Mind-Boggingly Sh#$%y Predictions. Instead let’s just look at how I did.
Since February, and my last Rotten Recap I’ve written and made predictions on 111 movies. That’s close to five hours worth of trailers, ignoring my kid every Sunday morning while daddy “works”, a couple of weeks worth of time on the Rotten Tomatoes site, ten billion clicks on IMDB, and a ton of time staring off into the distance trying to think of crap to write about animated movies.
Of those 111 movies, 57 predictions (51%) were within ten percent and 35 predictions (32%) were within five percent. This is a marked improvement from my last recap where only 43% were within ten percent and 26% were within five. What do all those numbers mean? It means I’m getting better with practice.
The Mona Lisa Vito Award for “Dead-on Balls” Accuracy
Three movies have been exact matches:
Conan the Barbarian (23%)
Bad Teacher (44%)
Arthur Christmas (92%)
A bunch of others were narrow misses like:
Water for Elephants (Predicted: 60% Actual: 61%)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Predicted: 36% Actual: 35%)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (Predicted: 79% Actual: 78%)
50/50 ((Predicted: 94% Actual: 93%)
Ides of March (Predicted: 86% Actual: 85%)
The John Travolta in Battlefield Earth Award for “What the F@#$ Was He Thinking
There’ve been some epic misses in there also:
Dolphin Tale (Predicted: 32% Actual: 83%)
One Day (Predicted: 77% Actual: 37%)
Your Highness (Predicted: 69% Actual: 26%)
Sucker Punch (Predicted: 63% Actual: 23%)
All of these missed by more the forty percent. Notice too that, except for a story about rehabilitating dolphins turning out to be a good flick, the rest of those were cases of me going way too high. What did I learn from that? Stop being so generous and overly-optimistic. I need to get more cynical (just in time for the holidays).
We’ve had a great run and plan on continuing to get better over time. Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting.
Quickly recapping last week:
The Muppets (Predicted: 90% Actual: 98%)
Arthur Christmas (Predicted: 92% Actual: 92%)
Hugo (Predicted: 94% Actual: 97%)
Another terrific turnout for the predictions. All three were wins and The Muppets would have been within five percent if Editor in Chief of Terrible Advice Katey Rich hadn’t talked me out of my 94% prediction. But I can really only take the blame (even after clearly blaming her a second ago). All in all a great week for predictions and movies.
Next week the ball drops early and Jonah Hill goes babysitting. It’s going to be a Rotten Week!
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