I Bet That Movie Is Gonna Suck

There is an interesting story in the LA Times about a brokerage firm that is trying to get approval for a new type of exchange which would allow people to bet on how movies are going to open. I constantly hear people say they can guess how much a movie will open to, now they can put their money where their mouth is. You can read the entire article here, but the gist of it is this: they would sell investors contracts based on how a movie is projected to open, with $1 million dollars of opening money translating to $1 in the contract (e.g. - a projected opening weekend of $40 million is a $40 contract). As the opening weekend approaches you can then option to either keep the contract or sell it back to the firm. If you keep the contract and the movie makes more money than expected you make $1 for every million over the projection. If you sell it back and the movie tanks then you made $1 for every million under the projection. While I hardly doubt that anyone would be able to get rich off this idea, but it is kind of a fun way to see how much better the general public knows what is going to happen over of the head of most movie studios. I mean, do you think any one out there would have kept a contract for The Bounty Hunter?

My bigger hope that this translates in some form as an increased consumer focus-group. Maybe as more and more terrible, generic romantic comedy contracts keep getting sold back and losing the brokerage firms money, the guys running them will start to report back to the heads of the movie studios (in my head they all hang out at the same country club in Beverly Hills) and start demanding better movies. In actuality, the more likely result is that these firms will instead put more money into the marketing strategy of those same terrible romantic comedies or start hiring the same people who set lines in Vegas to figure out more realistic numbers. Those guys have it down to a science to get just the right number that makes it really hard to be sure one way or another. However, because those guys keep track of everything to make their predictions, this would also lead to movie stars and directors having stats about how their movies opened and performed in the long run, which could then lead to a fantasy league for movie stars. Anything that leads to more fantasy sports can't be a bad thing.

-This afternoon during my quest for entertainment, I paused on the NFL Network to see what they were offering. The guide said it was the NFL Draft. "Surely," I thought to myself, "they must mean an NFL Draft recap, because no one would actually sit down to watch the draft a second time." As it turns out, it really was just a replay of the NFL Draft. Now, I'm all for the NFL Draft, but I don't like to watch replays of actual sporting events if I know how the game ends, so why would I, or anyone for that matter, want to watch what is essentially a list of names being read when you already know which name is about to be called? The whole reason you watch the draft is because you don't know what is going to happen. If this is something that you really would want to do I think your family needs to stage an intervention and you need to unplug your cable box for a while, because you need some help.