I’m a big enough person to admit that I was wrong, particularly when I was wrong in such a public fashion. So: I was wrong. My prediction that The Simpsons Movie would tank was woefully off the mark, and two bottles of wine have been delivered to Mike, per our bet. I shan’t even mention the fact that Mike bought 5,632,229 tickets to The Simpsons Movie last weekend.
Matt Groening’s yellow folk also topped this week’s Box Office Power Rankings with positive reviews and those inflated revenues.
But can Homer and company successfully defend their coveted Box Office Power Rankings title this weekend against a pissed-off Jason Bourne? What the hell: Yes.
Anybody want to make a friendly wager?
Box Office Power Rankings: July 27-29, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-screen, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) The Simpsons Movie (-; 10, 10, 8, 8: 36)
(2) Hairspray (1; 7, 8, 9, 9: 33)
(3) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (3; 8, 6, 6, 6: 26)
(3) Ratatouille (2; 4, 2, 10, 10: 26)
(5) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (4; 9, 9, 3, 3: 24)
(6) No Reservations (-; 6, 7, 4, 4: 21)
(7) Transformers (6; 5, 5, 5, 5: 20)
(8) Live Free or Die Hard (5; 3, 1, 7, 7: 18)
(9) Who’s Your Caddy (-; 1, 4, 2, 2: 9)
(10) I Know Who Killed Me (-; 2, 3, 1, 2: 8)
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.
