box office holdover premium
What it checks
Movies that hold over from week 1 to week 2 (60%+ retention vs typical 40%) signal positive word-of-mouth — long the distributor.
Mechanism
Per-release W2/W1 weekend-gross retention ratio is a clean word-of-mouth test. Typical drop-off is ~55-65% (R ≈ 0.40); R > 0.6 signals positive WOM that propagates over the next 2-4 weeks. Distinct from #245 long-tail drift which uses absolute distributor cohort baseline.
Signal rule
W2/W1 retention >= 0.6 → LONG distributor on the trading day after the W2 Sunday close; hold 10/20d.
Data dependencies
daily_pricesAdjusted-close OHLCV for every US-listed ticker; primary price feed.
box_office_dailyWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
box_office_distributor_ticker_mapWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
Expected edge
- Paper alpha
- 50-200 bps
- Paper window
- T+1 to T+20d
50-200 bps over 10-20d.
Example tickers where this is likely to fire
Illustrative only — the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.
Related families
box office opening driftEvent-drivenOpening-weekend grosses are still the single most-watched data point for the major US-listed studios. A weekend-gross surprise vs the rolling-12-release per-distributor baseline drives a measurable Monday-open drift in the distributor's equity that persists ~10 trading days before being fully absorbed.
box office long tail driftEvent-drivenOpening-weekend gross gets all the headlines but week-2/3 hold (W2_gross/W1_gross) is what actually predicts theatrical total — and therefore home-video / streaming licensing revenue 2-4 quarters out. A strong-legs release (W2/W1 > 0.7) is rare and underpriced because the news cycle has moved on by the time W2 numbers print Sunday night.
box office holiday window alphaEvent-drivenThanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day, and July-4 weekends are the four-tentpole release windows where studios bid for the biggest theatrical revenue of the year. A distributor that outperforms its non-holiday baseline during a tentpole window has disproportionately captured the year's marquee revenue and the equity drifts up 10d post-window as trade press digests final tallies.
box office genre x distributorConsumerDistributors skew toward specific genres (Disney → animation, Sony → horror via Screen Gems). When a distributor's recent slate concentrates >=50% in a single genre AND that genre's market-wide 12w/52w momentum is rising (ratio >= 1.2), the distributor outperforms. Genre keyword-classified from title text (no genre column in source).
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