It was a perfect storm in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.
The audience magnet of Tyler Perry met the critical favor accorded Michael Clayton met the in-between-on-both-measures We Own the Night, so we have a three-way tie for this past weekend’s title. And The Seeker got a perfectly awful score, ranking in 10th place in all four measures.
Expect similar wackiness this coming weekend.
And I’ll make a bold prediction: The Comebacks will not top next week’s rankings.
Box Office Power Rankings: October 12-14, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) We Own the Night (-; 8, 9, 9, 9: 35)
(1) Michael Clayton (-; 7, 8, 10, 10: 35)
(1) Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (-; 10, 10, 6, 9: 35)
(4) Across the Universe (-; 3, 7, 8, 7: 25)
(5) The Game Plan (2; 9, 6, 5, 3: 23)
(6) The Kingdom (1; 4, 3, 8, 7: 22)
(7) The Heartbreak Kid (3; 6, 4, 4, 5: 19)
(8) Elizabeth: The Golden Age (-; 5, 5, 3, 4: 17)
(9) Resident Evil: Extinction (5; 2, 2, 2, 2: 8)
(10) The Seeker (8; 1, 1, 1, 1: 4)
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-theater 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-theater 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.
