The rats still rule in Culture Snob’s Box Office Power Rankings, with the critical acclaim for Pixar’s and Disney’s Ratatouille easily overcoming the box-office power of (and surprisingly un-bad reviews for) Transformers. Michael Bay’s robot movie landed in third place, also behind Live Free or Die Hard.
The week’s other major release, the Robin Williams vehicle License to Wed, barely managed to beat a trio of moldy oldies with its abysmal notices.
Box Office Power Rankings: July 6-8, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-screen, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Ratatouille (1; 9, 9, 10, 10: 38)
(2) Live Free Or Die Hard (2; 8, 8, 7, 7: 30)
(3) Transfomers (-; 10, 10, 4, 4: 28)
(4) Knocked Up (4; 4, 3, 9, 9: 25)
(4) Sicko (3; 2, 7, 8, 8: 25)
(6) 1408 (5; 5, 5, 6, 6: 22)
(7) License to Wed (-; 7, 6, 1, 1: 15)
(8) Evan Almighty (6; 6, 4, 2, 2: 14)
(9) Ocean’s Thirteen (7; 1, 2, 5, 5: 13)
(10) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (7; 3, 1, 3, 3: 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.
