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The movie Avatar had its much anticipated opening in Europe
Dec 17 and in the US Dec 18 2009. It was such a major hit,
breaking records and pleasing not only movigoers but
critics, that it seemed likely to be an interesting GCP
event. It was, however infeasible to make a formal
prediction because there was apparently no well-defined
time. Some of the blogs and media coverage suggested 24
hours, or 3 days of opening.
Given the information that the 17th and 18th Dec were the
major opening days, I decided to take a look at those days.
The figure shows the 48 UTC hours, with 8pm UTC marked. This
would be roughly the time for an evening movie in Europe, and
for a midday matinee in the US. The figure is interesting,
but of course, given our small S/N ratio, can't be reliably
interpreted.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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