June 1st, 2015
I have a piece over at Acculturated about the math which proves that Pitch Perfect 2 sucks. What film criticism needs, obviously, is sabermetrics. Sample nerdery:
Pitch Perfect finished its run with $65 million—less than half as much as Taken 2. But that total gave it a multiple of 4.3, which is extremely high. As a general rule of thumb, movies with a box office opening weekend multiple greater than four tend to be regarded as instant classics, the kind of movies that everyone loves and talks about for years and that suck you in if you ever flip past them on TNT. Another sign of how beloved a movie is its home video sales proportional to box office (which we would totally call VoBO). Typical movies make roughly half as much on home video as they do in the theater. Taken 2, for instance, made $64 million in DVD sales, giving it a ratio of 0.46—thoroughly average. But once Pitch Perfect moved to home video, it took off, making $104 million in DVD sales, for a really high VoBO of 1.6.
And there’s no need for us to get into this, but let’s just say that I know from college a cappella . . .
AOHenry June 8, 2015 at 3:16 pm
Where do international sales fit into this? And hows does Pitch Perfect compare to Taken 2? International audiences tend to like action flicks better but Taken 2 makes foreigners evil so did that hurt it at the box office?