And I thought last week was grim … .
With Eastern Promises dropping out of the box-office top 10, there is now only one movie in our rankings with a Rotten Tomatoes score over 53: 3:10 to Yuma.
This week’s Box Office Power Rankings champion is The Kingdom, owner of a Rotten Tomatoes score of 53. Seven of the box-office top 10 have an RT score of 29 or below. It would appear that September and early October have become the new January in terms of dumping shit product into the marketplace.
In January, of course, we also get the wider release of December Oscar bait. And, thankfully, now the early batch of prestige pictures has arrived, with Elizabeth: The Golden Age opening and Michael Clayton and Across the Universe expanding.
Box Office Power Rankings: October 5-7, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) The Kingdom (1; 8, 8, 9, 9: 34)
(2) The Game Plan (2; 10, 10, 7, 6: 33)
(3) The Heartbreak Kid (-; 9, 9, 7, 7: 32)
(4) 3:10 to Yuma (2; 4, 4, 10, 10: 28)
(5) Resident Evil: Extinction (6; 7, 6, 5, 5: 23)
(6) The Brave One (6; 1, 1, 8, 9: 19)
(7) Feel the Noise (-; 3, 7, 4, 3: 17)
(8) The Seeker (-; 6, 2, 3, 2: 13)
(9) Good Luck Chuck (8; 5, 5, 1, 1: 12)
(9) Mr. Woodcock (10; 2, 3, 2, 5: 12)
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.
