A few months ago, I promised that I’d try to use the basic Box Office Power Rankings formula to predict a Best Picture winner. The hypothesis is that Best Picture winners tend to have a blend of prestige and popularity, and that a quantitative measure of those qualities might have predictive value.
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?
What’s the best way to platform-release a movie? The two top films in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings – Juno and Atonement – suggest that a faster path is better in terms of box office.
With inhuman Aliens, Predators, and Water Horses the only new things in wide release between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the Box Office Power Rankings this past weekend was all about re-shuffling. A cursory look at the rankings suggests that Juno is hot, and Sweeney Todd is not. But a closer examination reveals some interesting trends.
Even if it weren’t against two of my least favorite movie personalities – Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage – I’d root for Juno just because of Jason Bateman. Look at his list of credits and see a sad litany of roles in things few people remember beyond the punchline of Teen Wolf Too. Arrested Development resurrected his career, but it also made Scott Baio and Henry Winkler look good; true redemption requires parlaying success into more success. (No, mere resurrection just isn’t good enough these days, Jesus.)
A foolish person doesn’t recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does. The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it’s okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it’s important to stand up for what you believe in. “When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it,” he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. “And they’re willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in.”
I doubt Anton Chigurh (who will be referenced in every Culture Snob entry from this point forward) would appreciate the analogy, but No Country for Old Men looks like a perennial bridesmaid in the Box Office Power Rankings.
My first thought after watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men – amid groans from others in the theater – was that I understood why some people hate it.
In its opening weekend, The Golden Compass made more than twice as much money as any of its competitors, yet in the great equalizer that is the Box Office Power Rankings, it still ended up in third place, and barely beat out This Christmas.
Blog-a-thons are unusual in the world in that they seem a genuine win-win-win proposition. The hosts of blog-a-thons get traffic from participants’ readers. Participants get traffic from new readers through the host(s). And the world gets new writing, analysis, provocation, and thought that it wouldn’t have had without the blog-a-thon. In the case of Short-Film Week, we generated roughly three dozen new pieces on short films. This is a small, good thing.
