What the hell are Dane Cook and Juliette Binoche doing in the same movie? She, like Virginia Madsen, is commonly luminous, while he is merely overexposed.
The movie they share, Dan in Real Life, tops this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, while the weekend’s other major release, Saw IV, rode wretched reviews to a fifth-place finish.
And if you couldn’t tell from the first paragraph, I have little else to say on this topic.
Box Office Power Rankings: October 26-28, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Dan in Real Life (-; 9, 9, 7, 7: 32)
(2) Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1; 3, 8, 10, 9: 30)
(3) Michael Clayton (2; 5, 4, 8, 10: 27)
(4) Gone Baby Gone (3; 4, 5, 9, 8: 26)
(5) Saw IV (-; 10, 10, 2, 2: 24)
(6) 30 Days of Night (3; 8, 6, 5, 4: 23)
(7) Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (5; 6, 7, 4, 5: 22)
(8) We Own the Night (6; 2, 2, 6, 6: 16)
(8) The Game Plan (7; 7, 3, 3, 3: 16)
(10) The Comebacks (9; 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.
