Things are awfully quiet around here.
Too quiet.
And that can only mean one thing: Culture Snob is busy preparing for the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon, which starts on Sunday, December 2, and runs for seven days.
Or it could mean that I’ve been incredibly lazy this week.
Anyway, Disney’s Enchanted tops this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, placing first or second in all four criteria. The movie’s star, Amy Adams, has parlayed her Oscar nomination (for Junebug) into nascent stardom, in a movie that both critics and audiences like. Enchanted, indeed.
Box Office Power Rankings: November 23-25, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Enchanted (-; 10, 9, 10, 9: 38)
(2) This Christmas (-; 9, 10, 6, 8: 33)
(3) Beowulf (1; 8, 7, 8, 7: 30)
(4) American Gangster (1; 3, 3, 9, 10: 25)
(5) Bee Movie (4; 6, 4, 5, 5: 20)
(5) Stephen King’s The Mist (-; 2, 5, 7, 6: 20)
(7) Hitman (-; 7, 8, 1, 1: 17)
(8) August Rush (-; 4, 6, 3, 2: 15)
(9) Fred Claus (7; 5, 2, 2, 3: 12)
(10) Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (6; 1, 1, 4, 4: 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-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.
