Summer Movie Wager 2013

Since today is the start of the 2013 summer movie season, I thought it would be fitting to share a game that my friends and I play where we try to predict the Top 10 movies we think are going to do the best at the box office over the summer. In the hopes that this post will help someone else structure their own game for guessing the Top 10 summer movies, I’m posting the rules that we use:

RULES:
1. Pick 10 movies that are released during the summer and rank them in order from #1 (will make the most money) to #10.
2. Pick 3 “Dark Horse” movies. These are picks you think have a chance to make it into the Top 10 but for some reason, probably won’t. These are obviously different than the movies you picked for your Top 10.

The summer movie season is the first weekend in May to the first Monday in September.

SCORING:
– 13 points for getting #1 or #10 dead-on.
– 10 points for getting #2-9 dead-on.
– 7 points if your pick was only one spot away
– 5 points if your pick was two spots away
– 3 points if your pick was anywhere in the Top 10.
– 1 point for each Dark Horse that makes it into the Top 10.

The scoring is done once Labor Day has passed, although I generally like to score the lists every few weeks or so, just to see who is winning. The scoring is tabulated such that you only get the single highest point value for each movie pick. That means if you get #10 right, you only get 13 points; not 13+3 points.

I get the rankings from boxofficemojo.com and only use the domestic box office numbers (U.S. & Canada).