The last week of our Fantasy Movie League is now in the rear view mirror of life and it is time, as the title suggests, to wrap up the tale of the season.
This thirteenth and final week should have been a dramatic one. The gaps between the top six players should have been enough for some changes to occur. The problem was that as far as the week went, there were not a lot of surprises in store. Upsets only come with surprises, films exceeding, or failing to meet, expectations.
There were some new films on the list, but Black Panther was expected to dominate still into its second weekend, and so was split into three days again, leaving the lineup looking like this.
Black Panther (SAT) $534 Black Panther (SUN) $395 Black Panther (FRI) $334 Game Night $201 Peter Rabbit $167 Annihilation $154 Fifty Shades Freed $100 Jumanji $87 The 15:17 to Paris $62 The Greatest Showman $55 Every Day $45 Early Man $26 The Maze Runner $17 The Post $16 The Shape of Water $15
I think it was pretty universally agreed that a screen or two of Black Panther was the safe pick. Game Night seemed to have some potential, but you had to be a bit of a contrarian to run with it. Likewise, if you hoped against hope, Annihilation might have seemed viable, though the reviews out before screens locked seemed to make that unlikely.
I went what seemed to be the safe route and rode on Black Panther, anchoring on two screens of Friday, slotting in a screen of Game Night, and then back filling with Early Man in my ongoing mistaken belief that everybody has fond memories of Wallace and Grommit and that this will make Early Man succeed during a time when even the title seems to be working against it.
I tinkered with various other options, but kept going back to that, locking it in on Friday.
My Winter Week Thirteen Picks
That turned out to be the most popular lineup for the week, and in the Meta League, with four of us going that route.
There was some variation across the league, and some radicals went with four screens of Game Night, but most of us anchored on Black Panther.
Black Panther turned out to be the anchor for the perfect pick of the week, but it was a pair of Sundays that were needed, coupled with a screen of Fifty Shades, a screen of Every Day, and four screens of The Post, a set of picks I wouldn’t have touched. A set of picks a lot of people wouldn’t have touched I guess, since only six people got the perfect pick.
Winter Week Thirteen Perfect Pick
If somebody in the Meta League had gone that route, it could have changed the final lineup. Corr could have come in first. I could have been bumped out of third. But none of our picks were all that radical as the scores for the week show.
- Kraut Screens (T) – $85,854,487
- Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $85,388,127
- Joanie’s Joint (T) – $85,206,009
- Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $84,648,305
- Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $83,454,901
- Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $83,454,901
- Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $83,454,901
- Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $83,454,901
- Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $83,213,170
- Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $80,631,400
- Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $80,085,924
- Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $80,005,525
- Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $79,299,436
- Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $78,049,648
- SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $71,219,616
- I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $71,219,616
The Meta League Legend:
- TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
- MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)
Kraut Screens took the week, but overall there is barely a $15 million gap between first and last place, and the gap between the upper half of the scores this week is a mere $3 million.
That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:
- Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $1,353,892,212
- Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $1,346,243,354
- Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $1,297,477,638
- Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $1,280,673,691
- Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $1,277,791,402
- Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $1,257,578,055
- Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $1,253,528,836
- Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $1,215,941,564
- Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $1,193,133,908
- SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $1,173,221,457
- Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $1,121,506,158
- I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $1,115,224,163
- Kraut Screens (T) – $1,105,530,778
- Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $1,082,946,408
- Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $1,080,494,353
- Joanie’s Joint (T) – $1,066,304,533
The only change in that list over last week was Vigo Grimborne overtaking I HAS BAD TASTE. Everybody else held their spots.
And so it goes. For comparison House Harkonnen, who won the Season Showdown, clocked in with a total of $1,469,103,137 over the last thirteen weeks.
Congrats to Ben for winning the Meta League as well as the MCats Mulitplex League!
Against my own prediction, in which I declared that Pak and Po Huit would put me to shame this time around, I managed to eke out the win in the TAGN league and held third place overall in the Meta League.
Overall, weekly wins were fairly spread out. Corr and Ben both won three weeks in the MCats League, but only one person there did not win at least one week.
Likewise, in the TAGN league only one person who was in for the whole season did not win a week, with SynCaine winning three of those weeks.
That pretty much wraps up the season. The front end was dominated by Star Wars, while the back end was owned by Black Panther. But I think the film that surprised me the most was Jumanji, which has been in the running for week after week and is carrying on into the first week of the Spring season. I have to give The Greatest Showman in nod in that regard as well. I don’t know how it keeps hanging on, but there it is yet again alive for another week as other contenders have come and gone.
Star Wars, while it opened strong, was a bit of a disappointment over time at the box office. You cannot argue with the money it made initially, but it did not last as long in the hunt as the two I mentioned above or Wonder Woman or Guardian’s of the Galaxy Vol. II from the summer season. Fans of Star Wars had to see it… once. But it seemed to leave what I would consider the core fan base a bit underwhelmed, which led to the usual arguments over to whom the series should cater; kids or the long time supporters. I think the How It Should Have Ended episode of the film sums things up quite nicely… especially the little bit after the end credits.
There were a some cool things the movie could have done, or should have done, but avoided. Oh well, at least there was no pod racing.
As for next season, I am mostly in favor of carrying on posting. I was a little bit worried about the poll I took last time, not because it came out against the idea, but because it garnered so few votes. That seemed like a sign that, at best, people were not reading the posts and, at worst, they were actively driving people away.
However, the poll I took the next day about an actual MMORPG got about the same number of responses, so it looks more like I have about 40 regular readers, having driven everybody else away already, though it could still be possible that various forms of ad block and browser filtering could be eating the polls. I mean, it doesn’t take much to click on two freakin’ buttons, does it? People wouldn’t read the poll and say, “I don’t feel like I have enough information or experience to answer that” would they? That seems like behavior completely contrary to the ethos of the internet.
So I will likely carry on. A few new people have signed up for the TAGN League, Pak and Po Huit are plotting my downfall, and the regular posting cycle keeps me going in its own way. You can join the league as well. I will provide a fresh link in the comments after this goes live. Look for the post for the first week of the Spring Season on Thursday, just to get it into next month, which is a bit late, so don’t wait to do your picks until then.
