A rule to live by: Don’t bet against computer-animated movies for kids. For example: Kung Fu Panda topped this week’s Box Office Power Rankings by a wide margin, finally knocking Iron Man off its perch.
A prediction: Kung Fu Panda smash green ass of Incredible Hulk (at least in Box Office Power Rankings) while Happening cower with Zohan in corner like little girl.
Box Office Power Rankings: June 6-8, 2008
(Rank) Movie (previous week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Kung Fu Panda (-; 10, 10, 9, 9: 38)
(2) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (1; 8, 7, 8, 8: 31)
(3) Iron Man (1; 5, 5, 10, 10: 30)
(4) You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (-; 9, 9, 3, 5: 26)
(5) Sex and the City (3; 7, 8, 5, 4: 24)
(6) The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (4; 4, 4, 7, 7: 22)
(7) The Strangers (5; 6, 6, 4, 3: 19)
(8) Baby Mama (7; 2, 1, 6, 6: 15)
(9) What Happens in Vegas (8; 3, 3, 2, 1: 9)
(10) Made of Honor (10; 1, 2, 1, 2: 6)
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.
