Because nobody has pushed The Dark Knight off its perch (either in the weekly box-office-receipts charts or in our Box Office Power Rankings) … .
When Batman ($445 million through August 11) knocks Star Wars ($461 million) off as the second-highest-grossing movie in domestic-box-office history – which should happen this weekend – please keep the accomplishment in perspective.
Adjusted for ticket-price inflation, The Dark Knight at that point will still need nearly $130 million in additional gross before it even cracks the top 20. And it will need roughly $800 million more to catch Star Wars in inflation-adjusted revenues ($1.26 billion).
But let’s keep that in perspective. The Dark Knight exists in a culture with frenzied competition for your attention and your leisure dollars. When Star Wars opened, the moving-picture options available in my house were limited to three networks and the three other movies playing at our local cinema.
So while I don’t think it’s fair to say with a straight face that The Dark Knight will have beaten Star Wars at the box office after this weekend, it’s just as unfair to say it’s almost a billion dollars short of Gone with the Wind ($1.43 billion in inflation-adjusted receipts). The truth lies somewhere in between.
| Box Office Power Rankings: August 8-10 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics’ Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | The Dark Knight | 1 | 10 ($26.1M) | 9 ($6.5K) | 9 (94) | 9 (82) | 37 |
| 2 | Pineapple Express | – | 9 ($23.2M) | 10 ($7.6K) | 8 (69 | 8 (64) | 35 |
| 3 | The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 | – | 7 ($10.7M) | 7 ($3.9K) | 7 (65) | 7 (63) | 28 |
| 4 | WALL•E | 5 | 2 ($3.1M) | 2 ($1.5K) | 10 (97) | 10 (93) | 24 |
| 5 | Step Brothers | 2 | 6 ($9.1M) | 6 ($2.9K) | 4 (51) | 4 (50) | 20 |
| 5 | Journey to the Center of the Earth | 2 | 4 ($4.9M) | 4 ($2.5K) | 6 (61) | 6 (57) | 20 |
| 5 | Mamma Mia! | 2 | 5 ($8.2M) | 5 ($2.6K) | 5 (54) | 5 (51) | 20 |
| 8 | The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor | 6 | 8 ($16.5M) | 8 ($4.4K) | 1 (11) | 1 (31) | 18 |
| 9 | Hancock | 8 | 3 ($3.3M) | 3 ($1.5K) | 2 (38) | 3 (49) | 11 |
| 10 | Swing Vote | 7 | 1 ($3.1M) | 1 ($1.4K) | 3 (39) | 2 (47) | 7 |
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 than gross receipts alone.
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.
