Avatar's opening weekend & a work-from-home truce
Forecast scores and results from the Charter/Nonrival future of work forecast.
Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions.
How it works
On Sundays, read the newsletter and make a forecast by clicking a link at the bottom.
On Wednesdays, see what other readers predicted and how your forecast compares.
Over time, you’ll get scores based on how accurate your forecasts are.
In this issue
Avatar 2 forecasts from December scored
Reviewing forecasts from the Charter/Nonrival future of work partnership
Thanks for forecasting. Send feedback to newsletter@nonrival.pub .
Avatar 2 opening weekend
Last month, Nonrival asked how likely it was that Avatar 2 grossed $200m or more in the US in its opening weekend . That would have made it the second biggest opening weekend since the pandemic.
The average reader forecast said there was a 41% chance of that happening.
In fact, it brought in $134m in its US opening weekend , well short of $200m. So lower forecasts score better.
[IF YOU SUBSCRIBED AND MADE A FORECAST YOU’D SEE YOUR PERSONALIZED SCORE HERE.]
Despite not clearing $200m on opening weekend, the movie is still doing well and seen as evidence that Disney can still make successful blockbusters, per the Financial Times:
The movie’s haul at the weekend makes The Way of Water the seventh-highest grossing film of all time, ahead of Jurassic World. The original Avatar, released in 2009, remains the top moneymaker in cinema history with $2.9bn in total grosses. Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Comscore, said the film appeared to have further to run and could gross $2bn. “That Avatar still tops the box office in its fourth week is really impressive,” he said. “This thing is not slowing down at all.”
A work-from-home truce is coming in 2023
The last two years have been a tug-of-war over remote work, with CEOs trying to bring workers back to the office and staff mostly preferring to stay home. The staff usually won out. But 2023 will be different: the work-from-home wars will calm this year, leaving remote work much more common than it was in 2019 but nowhere near its 2020 highs.
At least that’s the gist of what Nonrival and Charter readers think.
As a reminder, last year the work-focused publisher Charter asked executives , “Looking ahead 12 months, which of these scenarios seems most likely regarding staff locations?”
Far and away the most common answer was: “Staff will come into an office more days each week than they do now.” Only 25% saw remote work increasing.
Charter and Nonrival partnered at the end of last year to ask readers from both publications for a prediction about how this same survey question would look when it was repeated later this year.
Specifically, we asked: How likely is it that “roughly the same” is the most-selected category when Charter repeats its survey in Q2 2023?
About two-thirds of readers thought it was likely or very likely that “about the same” would be the most popular choice. In other words, most readers think that far fewer executives will expect big changes in remote work.
This makes sense, since days worked from home in the US has been consistent for about a year now, hovering right around 30% — after shooting from 5% to more than 60% in the spring of 2020.
Work-from-home has arrived at a “new normal,” well above pre-pandemic levels. It seems like executives are the last ones to realize it — but this will be the year that they do.
Childcare & mentoring
We also asked whether more executives would say they provide childcare benefits and mentoring services when Charter repeats its survey.
The average forecast for "Will childcare become a more common corporate benefit in 2023?" was 46%
The average forecast for "Will formal mentoring become a more common benefit in 2023?" was 49%
Extras
What happened at Southwest?
The FTC wants to ban non-compete agreements
What do people watch on TV?
Grab bag
Coming up...
Look out for a new forecast Sunday as the regular Sunday-Wednesday cadence is back.