Review: Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson

As stated in the first post, the purpose of this blog is to create movie reviews based on data taken from the movie's preview.  Here we give Edge of Darkness a score (based on IMDBs 1-10 ranking) and we also predict exactly how much it will make opening weekend.

Predicted IMDB score: 6.7

Predicted weekend gross: $35 million

Predicted per-theater gross: $8,000

Trailer here.

In about a week, we'll see how we do.  Details on the review after the jump.

Mid-Week Feature: 80s wrestler vs. that guy with the voice

Movies have lots of fight scenes.  Usually these fights follow the same setup.  The hero enters the fight reluctantly only to reveal himself as a tremendous badass.  Luckily, the villain is also a tremendous badass, and the resulting brawl escalates to include punches that most normal humans couldn't take.

In They Live, 80s wrestler Roddy Piper faces off with Keith David in attempt to get David to put on a pair of sunglasses.  Now normally, you wouldn't think this kind of disagreement would warrant a movie fight, but we're pretty glad it did.  The number of body-breaking blows in this scene is after the jump.

About this blog

This blog is, at its essence, a movie blog, and like every movie blog out there, we will discuss many different aspects of films. But what (we hope) separates this blog from the others is that the primary purpose of this blog is to write movie reviews before the movies come out. Or rather, our reviews will be based primarily on movie previews.

This concept in and of itself might not be entirely novel, but we do bring something to the table that we believe is original. Our reviews will be based around numbers produced from a statistical model. We've compiled data from movie previews and created a model which relates different parts of a preview to a movie's IMDB score. Some of the data clearly relates to a movie's score (movie genre) while for others, the relationship might not be so clear (number of explosions in the preview). The hope is that by using the statistical model we will provide entertaining (possibly insightful) movie reviews for anyone who happens by.

It is also worth noting that this blog (like other movie blogs) will have certain interests. While we would not want to specifically skip any movies, it is inevitable that we will be attracted to those that we like (or those that we would simply like to write a review for). To give some idea of what kinds of movies these will be, here are a couple facts about our taste in movies: We believe that Crank 1 provides possibly the greatest movie experience ever (really, any movie with Jason Statham is probably going to be a good watch), and zombie movies can be a great time if you've got a couch, some friends and a 30-rack.

New reviews should appear weekly, and there will probably be some mid-week features to look out for.

To not get too bogged down in this first post, we leave you with a list of variables that did not make it into the final model:

• Is Jason Statham the lead actor?
• Is it a "star-studded" cast?
• Does the preview include an excessive number of fades? (See the Knowing preview for an example)
• Does the preview have a narrator?
• Do people die in the preview?
• Is it a lot of people?
• What gender is the lead?
• How many bullets are shot?
• How many bullets hit?
• Is the plot 100% revealed in the preview?
• If the movie were a book, how would the name rate? (courtesy of Lulu)