Call for Comments: Box Office Game 2022

From Hannah: Well, to borrow Mav’s words from this year, this year will continue to be … weird. It’s the end of the year, so it’s once again time for us to do our movie picks for the annual fantasy box office episode. If you’re new to our show, every year we play a game where we earn points by how well movies do at the North America box office. And this year’s results, like last year’s have been a mixed bag for obvious reasons. And given that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic (again), 2022’s probably are going to be too (or maybe not given how things have recently gone despite the threats of a new variant). But, despite weird feelings and weird times, we’re going to continue playing.

The rules are quite simple, all five hosts of the show are going to have a round robin fantasy draft where we each pick 15 movies that are set to premiere in 2022. Just like in fantasy football, no two people can have the same movie. The goal is to amass the highest American domestic box office total by the end of the year. BUT, there’s a couple caveats. You don’t get the entire domestic box office for the film. You only get the money that it amassed DURING 2022. This means, Avatar 2 if it comes out (I don’t believe it) as scheduled on Dec 16th only has a few weeks to amass its entire total, but Scream (arriving in January, maybe) has the entire year…. or at least as long as it can manage to stay in a theater of some kind or another. Except of course, this year there’s the added wrinkle that, will January movies even come out in theaters? Will March movies? Will some later movies get pushed back to 2023? Who knows?!?!? That’s the fun of the game. Furthermore, whatever the box office total is gets modified by the Metacritic score (probably, we may switch back to Rotten Tomatoes). So a movie that makes $100M but only has a 50% is worth $50M and if a movie makes a billion dollars, but critically bombs and gets one of the rare 0% ratings, it’s worth nothing! 

I used to love this game … but I also stopped trying last year. And will probably do the same this year.

So, before we draft, give us your thoughts. What movies do you think are the best to pick next year, keeping in mind that some things might just never come out? Some things may release direct to streaming. Some things could be delayed because they’re not finished. It should be a … year.

Oh, and which of us do you think won from 2021? (Hint: I wouldn’t bet on me.)

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