A few bits of bidness:
- Yes, things have been awfully quiet around here. Since mid-December, I’ve done shit. Four reasons: holidays, holidays hangover, Short-Film Week burnout, and preparations for the impending Spawn of Culture Snob.
- So yes, things will remain quiet around here.
- Regarding last week’s inquiry: Atonement’s wider release still didn’t push it past 10th place in overall box office this past weekend. I hereby declare its release pattern a failure, mostly because it’s fun to cast aspersions at Atonement.
In this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, Juno retained her crown by outrunning a couple of old farts with cancer. Yeah, she’s pregnant, but that’s still not fair, is it?
Box Office Power Rankings: January 11-13
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Juno (1; 8, 8, 10, 9: 35)
(2) The Bucket List (-; 10, 9, 6, 5: 30)
(3) Atonement (2; 1, 7, 9, 10: 27)
(4) First Sunday (-; 9, 10, 2, 4: 25)
(5) National Treasure: Book of Secrets (3; 7, 6, 5, 6: 24)
(6) I Am Legend (5; 5, 2, 8, 8: 23)
(7) The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (-; 2, 5, 7, 7: 21)
(8) Alvin and the Chipmunks (7; 6, 4, 4, 3: 17)
(9) P.S. I Love You (10; 3, 1, 3, 2: 9)
(9) One Missed Call (9; 4, 3, 1, 1: 9)
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.
I do wish more people would see Atonement, even so that it could be more widely discussed for its themetic material.
It certainly is getting the buzz though when it comes to magazine covers and images.
It’s so hard to tell what’ll really happen oscar nom morning, especially in regards to this film.