Fantasy Box Office 2015: Annual Rules Update
We at Stray Notions love movies, so we have created a Fantasy Box Office duel to spread that love. Check back each week to see how Tim and Ryan fare in their “friendly” little duel.
Fantasy Box Office 2015 is here and ready for your fanaticdom! As we always say, Fantasy Box Office is partially for our indulgence, but it also serves as a great way to continue to provide content to you the readers/listeners about the landscape of cinema, which we intend to do through weekly scoring updates and periodic Fantasy Box Office podcasts! The game is mostly the same as last year, but with a couple of very minor adjustments. To make it simple, here are this year’s rules:
1.) Each team, The Rotten Tim-atoes and The Ryan Collective will have a total roster of 18, 20, or 22 films during a given month.
2.) On the first Friday of each month, each player shall select 10 films to be retained while dropping the rest (as opposed to 8 in previous years).
3.) A monthly snake draft will be conducted where each player will select a new set of 8, 10, or 12 films that are scheduled to be released in the following month depending on the number of films available that month. These new films will be added to the 10 retained films to comprise the current roster for that month. The lowest scorer at the time of the draft (usually held around the middle of each month for movies scheduled to be released in the following month) will have the option to either select first (then resulting in picks 4,5,8,9, etc.) or second (then resulting in picks 3,6,7,10,etc.)
4.) For each scoring period of Friday through Sunday, the contestants will fill out a lineup of movies that will include 4 films from their respective current rosters: 1 that will be scored according to its total domestic box office earnings (1 point per million dollars), 1 that will be scored according to its domestic per screen average gross (1 point per thousand dollars), and two flex spots that can be scored either way, with the higher score being recorded. All individual film scores will be rounded down to the nearest tenth of a point. Scores will be tabulated as per their official box office earnings as released on www.boxofficemojo.com.
5.) In addition to the Friday through Sunday standard scoring period, each contestant will be allowed up to 50 additional screen days for the entire 2015 game to be selected and announced the week prior to the scoring. These films can be started on any day of the week. If a film reports a weekly or weekend score, but not a daily score for the day it is played, the given score will be evenly divided by the number of days during the time period of the given score. (Example: If a film only reports a weekend result, while a contestant chooses to start it as a bonus day for the Saturday of that weekend, the weekend result will be divided by 3.)
6.) All films will be subject to a “freshness” factor, meaning that the weekend or daily score of a film will be altered as a result of its freshness rating as per www.rottentomatoes.com, on the day that the film is in play or the Friday for each weekend. The “freshness factor breakdown is as follows:
90% fresh or greater will receive a “freshness” factor of 1.25.
80% to 89% will receive a “freshness” factor of 1.1.
60% to 79% will receive a “freshness” factor of 1.
40% to 59% will receive a “freshness” factor of 0.9.
39% and below will receive a “freshness” factor of 0.75.
These “freshness” factors will be multiplied by the raw scores for each weekend or bonus day to produce a final score for that film.
7.) Bonus points will be handed out each week as follows: Whichever team wins the week will get 5 bonus points. Whichever team has the top scoring film will get 5 bonus points. Any team that starts four “fresh” movies (60% or better) in the lineup during the standard scoring period (Friday through Sunday) will get 5 bonus points.
8.) Our biggest change for this year deals with annual bonuses for films finishing in the top 10 in terms of worldwide annual gross for 2015. The scoring will still be as follows: If a film finishes December 31, 2015 as the top worldwide grossing film, it will earn the contestant 100 bonus points. The 2nd place film will earn it’s contest 90 bonus points, the 3rd: 80 bonus points, and so on down to the 10th place film earning 10 bonus points on the year. No financial results will be counted beyond December 31, 2015 for this bonus. The major difference lies in the acquiring of films for this bonus. This year, instead of conducting a separate draft of films to retain as separate assets, each of the films eligible for this bonus will be plucked from the existing rosters of the two contestants, which means that each contestant will need to retain high grossing films on their roster until the end of the 2015 in order to get these bonus points. For example, a film drafted in the May draft will only get points for finishing the year in the worldwide top 10 if that contestant keeps that film on his roster from May 1st through December 31st. (thus the need for expanded roster sizes)
9.) Whichever team accrues the most total points as of Thursday, December 31, 2015 will be declared the winner of Fantasy Box Office 2015!
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