Gross Complement

Holy cow.

If UNC made this mistake randomly, and if you could get data on these kids in a few years, there must be at least a few good papers to be written.

Claims Gui: “Sequels are always terrible.”

I certainly buy that sequels are typically worse than the original film. We should probably chalk this up to regression to the mean, before we try any fancier explanations.

Also, it’s hard to say whether sequels are actually worse than the average movie. Most of us are only aware of a biased subset of the movies that get released, hopefully a subset biased towards better movies. [Depends on your friends, right?]

The average movie may well be worse than we think. Since we are conscious of sequels (and watch them on airplanes) because of their famous big brothers—not their quality—they look bad when compared to our usual, biased sample.