2015 Summer Blockbuster review

Summertime rhymes with school break, fireworks, BBQ, but just as inseparable are Hollywood's big blockbusters. Early 2015, even as early as late 2014 we had teasers and trailers for the big upcoming wave of big budget movies, many of which sequels to blockbuster sagas. Terminator 5, Jurassic Park 4 anyone?

Starting early summer I pulled daily stats for 20 of the most anticipated summer movies of 2015, and before we enter the new year, let's see how they did.

Rating Evolution

In these two earlier posts I looked at the evolution IMDB scores after movies' releases, as well as after Game of Thrones episodes aired. In both cases we observed a trend in rating decrease as time went by, although this phenomenon was much more sudden for TV episodes (a few days) than for movies (multiple weeks / months).

Here's the trend for our 20 blockbusters, all aligned according to release date, and titles ordered according to final rating:

Again, we observe the same declining trend, although the asymptote seems to be reached much sooner than for the average movie (earlier analysis).

Straight Outta Compton clearly emerges as the best-rated movie of the summer although it did not benefit from as much early marketing as most of its competitors. Straight Outta Compton also distinguishes itself from the other movies in another way. While all movies dropped an average of 0.3 rating points between release date and latest reading (not as dramatic as the 0.6 drop observed across a wider range of movies in the previous analysis already mentioned, as if summer blockbuster movies tend to decrease less and stabilize faster), Straight Outta Compton actually improved its rating by 0.1 (this is not entirely obvious from the graph, but the movie had a rating of 8.0 on its release date, jumped to 8.4 the next day, and slowly decreased to 8.1). Only two other movies saw their ratings increase, Trainwreck from 6.2 to 6.5 and Pixels from 4.8 to 5.7, the latter increase while quite spectacular still falls way short from making the movie a must-see, despite the insane amounts spent on marketing. As you might have noticed from my posts, my second hobby is basketball, and I remember this summer when not a day would go by without seeing an ad for Pixels on TV or on websites where NBA stars battled monsters from 1970 arcade games.

Which brings us to the next question: did budget have any effect on how well the movies did, either from a sales or rating perspective? Of course we are very far from establishing a causal model here so we will have to satisfy ourselves with simple correlations across five metrics of interest: IMDB rating, number of IMDB voters, movie budget, gross US sales and Metascore (aggregated score from well-established critics).

I would have expected the highest correlation to be between IMDB rating and Metascore (based on another analysis I did comparing the different rating methodologies). However, it came at second place (0.73) and I honestly had not anticipated the top correlation (0.87) between budget value and number of IMDB voters. Of course we can't read too much into this correlation that could be completely spurious, but it might be worth confirming again later with a larger sample. If I had to give a rough interpretation though, I would say that a movie's marketing spend is probably highly positively correlated with the movie's budget. So the higher the budget, the higher marketing spend and the stronger 'presence of mind' this will have on users who will be more likely to remember to rate the movie. Remember my example of all the Pixels ads? I didn't see the movie, but if I had, those ads might have eventually prompted me to rate the movie independently of how good it was, especially if those ads appeared online or even on IMDB itself.

But while we wait for that follow-up analysis, we can all start looking at the trailers for the most anticipated movies of next year, sequels and reboots leading the way once again: X-Men, Star Trek, Captain America, Independence Day...

Are we seeing All-Stars at the All-Star?

The starters for the Western and Eastern teams of the upcoming NBA All-Star game were just announced Jan 22nd. The selection was uniquely based on fan votes.

In the West we have the vote-leading player Steph Curry, along with Marc Gasol, Blake Griffin, Kobe Bryant and Anthony Davis. Their Eastern counterparts will be Pau Gasol (not sure how often two brothers have faced each other in an All Star Game...), LeBron James, Kyle Lowry, John Wall and Carmelo Anthony.

The selection did raise quite a few eyebrows to say the least. Kobe? Sure he's an NBA legend, future hall-of-famer and all, but look at the Lakers record this season, look at his abysmal shooting percentage of 37.3%. Carmelo is also somewhat of a surprise given how the Knicks are performing this year. Sure the All Star is not about the team but the player, but his stats aren't eye-popping either. And then consider all the ones who didn't get in, James Harden, Klay Thompson, the entire Atlanta Hawk roster... Even if not for those reasons but purely on the voting volume, Mark Cuban declared the voting system broken.

fivethirtyeight.com had a very interesting post on the topic, attempting to correlate players' performance with the number of votes received. Performance was measured in terms of Win Above Replacement (WAR), the number of team wins attributable to that player (computed as the difference between the number of wins the team got with that player in the game, versus a hypothetical world where the player is replaced by an average player). It does seem that the above a certain threshold, high-impact players get the votes they deserve, but under that threshold it's all more or less random.

Now I think the real question is: what do we want in an All Star game? Players naturally view it as an honor, a testimony of a great year they're having. But are fans voting for players deserving recognition? Or do they want pure 100% showtime? Imagine a natural born dunker, explosive, athletic and artistic at the rim. Even if that player had below average EFG%, below average WAR, RPM, RAPM or any of the other advanced metrics to measure player performance, wouldn't fans still want to see him in the All Star game?

So while I'm not saying it's fair to the players, I can understand why a Kobe would get voted in, and why a Paul Millsap or Kyle Korver wouldn't. If we really want to understand how fans vote, it would be interesting to see if we could find a metric that better correlates with player votes than WAR. Or perhaps first start including WAR for past seasons as well? I'm sure that if we did that we would have a better understanding as to why Kobe got voted. But how about a combination of team wins + number of dunks in the season? Or number of fast break points?

The debate does seem old and familiar, perhaps because it's so closely related to the one we have every single year about who should be MVP and how MVP is defined? The player with the stellar stats? The player who was most impactful on his team's success?

Unbe-klay-vable! (apologies, klay-verest pun I could think of)

Exactly nine years and two days ago, Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a game.
Yesterday, Klay Thompson had a historical feat of his own: 52 points, which in itself is not jaw-dropping, but the way he recorded it was, thanks to 37 points in the third quarter alone (9/9 from 3-point land and 4/4 for 2-pointers).

If there ever was a definition of a player being hot, we witnessed it yesterday! Tracy McGrady did score 13 points in 35 seconds, but what Klay did is on another level.

But for the sake of some fun stat: What was the probability of Klay putting on this insane shooting display?

For the 2014-2015, Klay started the third quarter having attempted 272 3-pointers and made 120 (44.1%). He had also attempted 386 2-pointers and converted 188 of them (48.7%).

Assuming all his third quarter shots are independent of each other (very reasonable assumption, the only thing that could invalidate it is if there was such a thing as a "catching fire" effect), then the probability of Klay scoring a perfect 9-of-9 3-pointers and 4-of-4 2-pointers is 0.441^9 * 0.487^4 = 3.6e-5! Or 1 in almost 30,000. Basically, you would expect such a performance once every 342 seasons! Or Klay would have a higher probability of getting struck by lighting once in his life.

One question that this mind-boggling performance also raises is whether it has cemented Klay Thompson to be as inconsistent as ever? I am sure Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman will have some thoughts about this.

Even if you've seen the highlights countless times already, never hurts to review this once-in-342-seasons performance: