Knocked Up once again triumphed in Culture Snob’s Box Office Power Rankings, with no serious threat posed by Fantastic Four (fourth, of course!) or Nancy Drew (sixth).
Now comes Evan Almighty, which – given the early reviews – won’t contend for the top spot, either. But that doesn’t mean Knocked Up will win its fourth-consecutive title next week. I’m guessing Ocean’s Thirteen will overtake it.
Box Office Power Rankings: June 15-17
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-screen, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Knocked Up (1; 8, 8, 10, 10: 36)
(2) Ocean’s Thirteen (2; 9, 9, 8, 8: 34)
(3) Surf’s Up (3; 6, 6, 9, 9: 30)
(4) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (-; 10, 10, 1, 3: 24)
(5) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (5; 7, 7, 3, 4: 21)
(6) Nancy Drew (-; 4, 5, 5, 5: 19)
(7) Spider-Man 3 (7; 1, 2, 7, 7: 17)
(7) Shrek the Third (6; 5, 4, 2, 6: 17)
(9) Mr. Brooks (10; 2, 3, 6, 1: 12)
(10) Hostel: Part II (7; 3, 1, 4, 2: 10)
Methodology
Culture Snob’s Box Office Power Rankings balance box office and critical reception to create a better measure of a movie’s overall performance against its peers.
The weekly rankings cover the 10 top-grossing movies in the United States for the previous weekend. We assign equal weight to box office and critical opinion, with each having two components. The measures are: box-office gross, per-screen average, Rotten Tomatoes score, and Metacritic score.
Why those four? Box-office gross basically measures the number of people who saw a movie in a given weekend. Per-screen average corrects for blockbuster-wannabes that flood the market with prints, and gives limited-release movies a fighting chance. Rotten Tomatoes measures critical opinion in a binary way. And Metacritic gives a better sense of critics’ enthusiasm (or bile) for a movie.
For each of the four measures, the movies are ranked and assigned points (10 for the best performer, one for the worst). Finally, those points are added up, with a maximum score of 40 and a minimum score of four.
