Mediocre FML Early Bird Contest 2 1/2: The Smell of Cellulose (Open to All)

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Welcome Friends,

After the massive success of the first Fantasy Movie League (FML) Early Bird Contest a poll was take on whether or not people were interested in another and, well, here we are. This contest is the brainchild of @Pavlov with its origins in an interesting experiment that flourished and grew into a really fun competition for an awesome prize put together by the @Pavlov family.

This round, we’re going to mix things up a bit to make it really interesting! For starters, we’re going bigger and better than ever before. We’re going to have more prizes, more ways to win them, and possibly most important of all, the prizes will be composed of contributions from Mehmbers around the country which will be assembled into fuku form and scrambled such that even I won’t know what’s inside which prize. It should be a blast!

With all that said, you’re probably not here to hear me blather away so let’s get down to business.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Fantasy Movie League?
An excellent question and I’m so glad you’ve asked it! In all honesty, FML themselves explain it best but for a TL;DR version here goes:

You own a cineplex, you want to make money, you have eight screens and you rent movies to show on each screen using your weekly film rental budget for varying prices dependent upon expected performance. You profit and repeat for 13 weeks. At the end somebody is in first place.

Get it? Got it? Good. If not, ask any questions you have here in the thread and we’ll try to help you fill in the blanks.

How do I participate?

We’re changing things up a bit this round to try to make things run a bit smoother for everybody involved. Last round we had a few issues with people going over budget and kind of getting screwed as a result so we’re trying to head that off. Further, the contest took a lot of work to run so I’m hoping to cut down on that workload as I’ve gotten really busy since we started the first contest. So, here goes, this is what you need to do:

Getting Started

There are a few preparatory steps you’ll want to take in order to participate in the contest.

  1. Sign up for Fantasy Movie League (it’s free and only takes an email address (any email address) – if you already have an account feel free to make an alt account for this contest if you like!
  2. Join the Mediocre Early Bird Contest Redux League on FML, this is where the bulk of activity for the contest will take place. If asked for a password enter ‘f00lWins’ (an in-joke from the first contest) – we have a password to keep non-Mehtizens out.
  3. If you don’t already have one sign up for a Google Account – this will be used to post your submissions to the forms for our contest.
  4. (Optional) E-mail the word “Updates” to early.bird@mehmbersonly.com to be added to an email list to have announcements about the contest delivered directly to your inbox! Include the word “Reminders” to be further added to a reminder email list for impending deadlines.
Weekly Participation

Here’s what you’ll need to do each week to participate:

  1. Pick your movies for the week on the Fantasy Movie League website before the deadline. Picking here first will help prevent you from going over budget!
  2. Enter your picks into the weekly Google Form before the deadline. This is how we verify that all entries are true Early Bird picks!
  3. Wait and see how you’ve done.

On a typical week unofficial projections are released Saturday, studio estimates on Sunday, and final results for the weekend on Monday. There’s no need to check back on all of these updates if you don’t want to.

You said something about a deadline?

Yeah I did. You see, for the normal FML contest there’s a hard deadline of 12:00 Noon EST on Fridays. While that’s great and all this is the Early Bird contest, we do things a bit differently. Normal weeks (those following normal two day weekends) have a deadline of 12:00 Midnight EST (with a brief unannounced grace period to allow for deal checking) on Wednesday (Thursday AM). For shortened weeks caused by long weekends the deadline will be announced here but it will usually be 12:00 Noon EST on Thursday.

How do I Win? What are the Prizes?

This round we’re opening things up to offer more ways to win than simply having the best overall revenue for the duration of the contest. These prizes and the means to win them are still being worked out but the current thinking is as follows:

  1. Midas - This prize will be awarded to the person who wins the Early Bird League overall following the normal rules of Fantasy Movie League with our modified deadline and procedure.
  2. Earliest Bird - This prize will be awarded to the person who has the best revenue with the earliest picks. Early picks will be awarded bonuses based upon how many days in advance they registered their picks. Each day early will be awarded a $5M bonus with intervals occurring every 24 hours preceding the deadline.
  3. Mr. Scrooge - This prize will be awarded to the person whose cineplex performs best while spending the least amount of money. A bonus of $50K will be added to your score for each dollar you don’t spend up to a total bonus of $25M and with the caveat that you must do your best to fill your entire cineplex. The only instance in which a screen may be left blank and still receive a bonus is if there are no films available within your budget with which to fill it.
  4. Best in Show - This prize will be awarded to the person who chooses the most Best Pictures in their cineplex throughout the contest. In the case of a tie score will serve as the tie breaker.

I’m pretty excited about these three prize categories but I am willing to consider any additional category suggestions up until the first deadline at 12:00 Midnight on March 2, 2017. Further discussion of the existing categories and the criteria to win them will be considered through the second deadline on March 9, 2017 at which point any further changes will only be made on an emergency basis by the contest administrator to avoid 1) a constantly shifting playing field and 2) any chance of bias (I am ineligible for prizes).

One last note on the prizes. A given paricipant may only win one prize. If you win Midas and would otherwise be eligible for Earliest Bird that prize will be awarded to the second place contestant and vice versa.

I look forward to this contest and hope that we will see as much interest in the second round as we did for the first, if not more!

Form link