Ridley Scott’s American Gangster easily won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings title, as what was anticipated to be its most serious competition (Bee Movie) did worse with both audiences and critics.
Box Office Power Rankings: November 2-4, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) American Gangster (-; 10, 10, 8, 9: 37)
(2) Dan in Real Life (1; 7, 8, 7, 7: 29)
(2) Bee Movie (-; 9, 9, 6, 5: 29)
(4) Michael Clayton (3; 3, 1, 9, 10: 23)
(5) Gone Baby Gone (4; 1, 3, 10, 8: 22)
(6) 30 Days of Night (6; 5, 4, 5, 5: 19)
(7) Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (7; 2, 6, 4, 6: 18)
(8) Saw IV (5; 8, 7, 1, 1: 17)
(9) Martian Child (-; 4, 5, 3, 3: 15)
(10) The Game Plan (8; 6, 2, 3, 2: 13)
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.
