2013 Summer Box Office Showdown

According to my calendar, May is here. This means that the much anticipated summer movie season is finally upon us. As the weather warms up so does the box office as all the heavy weight blockbusters come out to play. Like any summer movie season, this year will feature unexpected hits and misses. The fun comes when trying to determine what movies will fall into these categories.

With this in mind, we at Shawgoes To The Movies have decided to add to this fun by having, what we are calling a Summer Box Office Showdown. I want to start by saying that we are not the first to do this. I first heard of this type of challenge from Rope of Silicon where Brad Brevet and Laremy Legal do this sort of thing on their podcast Brad n’Laremy On Movies. They got the idea from Film Drunk.

The Shawgoes to the Movies edition of this contest consist of myself, Brad Shawgo, Josh Niederer (the other half of the Shawgoes to the Movies writing team) and my brother Nick. On Wednesday, May 1^st we each drafted 12 different movies. With the number one pick in the draft, Josh took the already box office monster, Iron Man 3. With the second pick, I went with the family dollar in the form of Despicable Me 2. With the third and final pick in the first round, Nick took Man of Steel.

The Shawgoes to the Movies Summer Box Office Showdown will use a film’s net gross. We will take each film that was drafted and multiply budgets by 2.5. This is done to make for a more challenging contest. If this were not done, practically every film would have a positive net income. This way, most films have to do well worldwide and not just domestically or internationally. We take this adjusted budget and subtract it from the film earnings. Allow me to use last year’s box office champ, The Avengers, as an example. The Avenger’s budget was $220 million according to Box Office Mojo. That number is multiplied by 2.5 giving us an adjusted budget of $550 million. The Avenger’s had a worldwide gross of $1.5 billion dollars. The $550 million adjusted budget is then subtracted from $1.5 billion which gives us the number that we use: $950 million. We will take all the movies we drafted and add their totals. The person with the greatest total earnings will be named the Summer Box Office Showdown champion. Below is the list of movies that each person drafted.

Josh: Iron Man 3, The Great Gatsby, Star Trek: Into Darkness, The Wolverine, The Great Gatsby, The Heat, This is the End, Percy Jackson, The World’s End, One Direction: This Is Us, Paranoia, Pacific Rim, White House Down

Brad: Despicable Me 2, Monster’s University, Fast and Furious 6, The Smurfs 2, 300: Rise of an Empire, Planes, Grown Ups 2, Turbo, Now you see me, The To Do List, Before Midnight, V/H/S 2

Nick: Man of Steel, The Hangover Part III, Epic, World War Z, The Internship, The Lone Ranger, After Earth, The Purge, 2 Guns, Elysium, Grandmasters, Getaway

What do you think? What movies will be this summer’s box offices surprises? What movies will be flops? What is your most anticipated? Who will win the Summer Box Office Showdown?