…if you live in France and are predicting the movie(s) that will be shown on a TV a couple of months in advance.

To understand this, you need to realize one very strong trend: production studios are churning movie sequel after sequel. Let’s have a look at the pipeline for the coming couple of months:

• Spider-Man 3
• Die Hard 4 (Live Free or Die Hard)
• Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 (At World’s End)
• Fantastic Four 2 (Rise of the Silver Surfer)
• Ocean’s 11 3 (Ocean’s 13)
• Harry Potter 5 (and the Order of the Phoenix)
• Bourne’s Identity 3 (Bourne’s Supremacy)
• 28 Weeks Later (28 Days Later 2)
• …

It’s not hard to realize why: there’s almost no (financial) risk in shooting a sequel to a successful movie.

So, what does this have to do with French TV? Well, we all know how forgetful consumers can get. In order to refresh their memory on how awesome the Spider-Man is, just a few weeks before the next in the series (Spider-Man 3) hits the theaters, the good souls on TF1 (Télévision Française 1) are showing Spider-Man 1 today (ce soir, 20:50).

And if it’s not too expensive, we’ll most likely see Spider-Man 2 next week. Then Pirates of the Caribbean 1 in mid-May (the second one is probably too expensive to license as it’s a mere year since it’s been in the theaters). And then Die Hard 1 & 2 around middle June.

See? It’s easy. Find the premiere date, offset it by about a week or two and you can predict which movie will be shown on a French TV. Cool, huh?