(updated 7/28/13)

Welcome to the Double Feature Duel page! This was not supposed to be this big, but it is. So now I feel the need to dedicate a page to this no-longer casual endeavor of mine. I was simply going to make this 68-movie bracket and have them compete against each other. It didn’t dawn on me until later to have people fill out brackets. And it didn’t dawn on me until after I received a bunch exactly how much work that would mean for me. Oh well. That’s my burden. At least it will be over before football season.

The Players
I had 19 people fill out brackets, which is pretty awesome. It should be a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Therefore, I will be updating these when I get around to it. If my daughter sleeps through the night.

The Miami Quadrant just wrapped up its first (second) round. Check out the results after the first 8 games. Congrats to the two perfect scores (Annie and Jeremy D) and some of you aren’t in such good shape. But there’s always still hope. Unless you lose your champion in this round. Then there’s problems. Good luck!

The Rules

1. Everyday around noon, I will post a simple question to the facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/doublefeatureduel), along the lines of “Better Movie: Jaws or Wreck-It Ralph?” and people will vote. Anyone with a facebook account can vote, so feel free to let your friends know about it. Whoever is ahead at noon (or at my first login after noon) the following day will win that match. Another question will be posed then and so on for 67 days until the end of the tournament.
2. If there is a tie when I log in to count the votes, I will cast the winning vote, which will go to the higher seed (which is why I seeded them that way). If the seeds are the same (First Four or Final Four), I will consult my wife or the nearest cat.

Scoring
Every correctly picked match will get points according to the following round:

• Round of 64: 1 point
• Round of 32: 2 points
• Round of 16: 4 points
• Round of 8: 8 points
• Round of 4: 16 points
• Round of 2: 32 points

For a total of 192 points. Every round is worth a total of 32 points. It’s kinda cool how it works out like that, right?

The Bracket

My goal was to mirror the NCAA men’s basketball tournament as closely as possible with this movie battle. For the overcurious, here’s how I did it.

• I came up with 31 conference (genre) champions to get automatic bids into the tournament. This means I had to first come up with 31 genres, which is why you see stuff like “Political Movie” and “Animal Movie.” Unlike the NCAA, movies can span multiple genres, though maybe not Political Movie AND Animal Movie. So I just kinda fudged some stuff.
• Then I came up with the 37 at-large bids to fill out the rest of the tournament. Or more to the point, I came up with about 87.
• I then whittled them down to 41 and sent the 8 that were “on the bubble” to a panel of seven friends (video store owners, film school grads, movie podcasters, etc). One would put one in the tournament and the next would take one out. This continued until I had a “Last Four In” and a “First Four Out.”
• Then I ranked all the movies, in order of my favorite, from 1 to 68. Well, I ranked them in groups of four, with the exception of the 11 and 13 seeds (of which there were 5) and the 16 seeds (of which there were 6).
• I then scheduled the “First Four” games to narrow the 11, 13 and 16 seeds down to 4 apiece. This is how it was done in the NCAA this year for some reason. I even scheduled them to fit into the field of 68 in the same manner.
• Then I named the brackets after the schools I attended, again not thinking this would be as popular as it has gotten. If I had that to do over, I’d name them after cities. Or colors. Or directors or something.
• Last, I plugged the movies into the bracket according to their seeds. I largely put the seeds into the bracket according to the point in my life when I saw them, which I also should have done over, since it put most of the older movies in the same bracket. Then I messed with things a bit to ensure some fun matchups and to make sure certain movies (Coen Brothers, Chris Nolan) didn’t knock each other out in the first two rounds.
• And voila! A bracket of 68 teams. Since the bracket creation, I have also come up with a schedule. I went through each of the 8 matches from a bracket at random and continued this until all four brackets were complete.

The Prize
I haven’t publicized this at all, but the winner will get as much creative input into next year’s bracket as he/she wants. Well, we’ll talk. But that’s the idea for now. After all, who wants to keep voting on my favorite movies?