As people tell us time and time again, box-office performance is in the eye of the beholder.
Box Office Mojo wrote that Michael Jackson’s This Is It, in its debut weekend, did “exceptionally well for a concert picture or music documentary.” On the other hand, Disney’s A Christmas Carol “stumbled a bit out of the gate.”
Guess which one made $30 million and which one pulled in $23 million in its opening weekend.
Yep. The stumbler made more.
The two movies are within a couple hundred theaters of each other. Michael Jackson had literally no new-wide-release competition, and as you might have heard, Michael Jackson died suddenly in June. Charles Dickens had to fight off Goats, aliens, and whatever Richard Kelly is selling in The Box. And again: A Christmas Carol made $7 million more than This Is It, even though it had significantly weaker reviews.
It also earned $7 million more in its opening weekend than The Polar Express, made by the same director with the same technique for the same holiday. But as Mojo helpfully adds: “Polar Express … was muted by opening a few days after The Incredibles whereas Carol had no such direct competitor.”
The unstated premise here – and it is truly unstated in these weekend roundups – is the size of the gamble. A Christmas Carol cost $200 million to make ($35 million more than Polar Express, by the way), while the production costs of This Is It had been spent before the decision was made to turn those rehearsals into into a movie. So any revenue generated by This Is It is gravy, while A Christmas Carol has far to go before it’s in the black.
I’m no defender of Robert Zemeckis or these motion-capture animated things, but I refuse to consider a $30-million, non-Thanksgiving November opening a disappointment, either in absolute terms or compared to a postmortem cash-in. (Yeah, I know it was assembled with affection and skill, but it’s still a postmortem cash-in.)
Others might be harsh in their assessments, but cheer up, Robert! You did win the Box Office Power Rankings, and Michael didn’t.
| Box Office Power Rankings: October 30-November 1, 2009 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics’ Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | Paranormal Activity | 1 | 9 ($16.4M) | 10 ($6.8K) | 10 (84) | 9 (68) | 38 |
| 2 | Michael Jackson’s This Is It | – | 10 ($23.2M) | 9 ($6.7K) | 9 (80) | 8 (67) | 36 |
| 3 | Where the Wild Things Are | 2 | 6 ($5.9M) | 4 ($1.6K) | 8 (70) | 10 (71) | 28 |
| 4 | Law Abiding Citizen | 4 | 8 ($7.4M) | 7 ($2.7K) | 4 (23) | 4 (34) | 23 |
| 5 | Astro Boy | 6 | 4 ($3.5M) | 2 ($1.1K) | 7 (48) | 7 (53) | 20 |
| 6 | Saw VI | 3 | 5 ($5.3M) | 5 ($1.7K) | 6 (44) | 2 (30) | 18 |
| 7 | Amelia | – | 1 ($3M) | 8 ($2.8K) | 3 (17) | 5 (37) | 17 |
| 8 | Couples Retreat | 9 | 7 ($6.5M) | 6 ($2.1K) | 2 (12) | 1 (23) | 16 |
| 9 | Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant | 8 | 2 ($3.1M) | 1 ($1.1K) | 5 (37) | 6 (43) | 14 |
| 10 | The Stepfather | 10 | 3 ($3.2M) | 3 ($1.4K) | 1 (11) | 3 (33) | 10 |
| Box Office Power Rankings: November 6-8, 2009 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics’ Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | Disney’s A Christmas Carol | – | 10 ($30.1M) | 10 ($8.2K) | 7 (55) | 7 (55) | 34 |
| 2 | Michael Jackson’s This Is It | 2 | 9 ($13.2M) | 7 ($3.8K) | 9 (80) | 8 (67) | 33 |
| 3 | Paranormal Activity | 1 | 6 ($8.3M) | 6 ($3.2K) | 10 (84) | 9 (68) | 31 |
| 4 | The Men Who Stare at Goats | – | 8 ($12.7M) | 9 ($5.2K) | 7 (55) | 6 (54) | 30 |
| 5 | Where the Wild Things Are | 3 | 2 ($4.2M) | 2 ($1.5K) | 8 (70) | 10 (71) | 22 |
| 6 | The Fourth Kind | – | 7 ($12.2M) | 8 ($4.8K) | 2 (15) | 3 (34) | 20 |
| 7 | The Box | – | 5 ($7.6M) | 5 ($2.9K) | 4 (47) | 4 (47) | 18 |
| 8 | Law Abiding Citizen | 4 | 3 ($6M) | 4 ($2.4K) | 3 (23) | 3 (34) | 13 |
| 9 | Astro Boy | 5 | 1 ($2.6M) | 1 ($1.4K) | 5 (48) | 5 (53) | 12 |
| 10 | Couples Retreat | 8 | 4 ($6.1M) | 3 ($2.1K) | 1 (12) | 1 (23) | 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 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.
