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.)
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.
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.
Behold the power of the Box Office Power Rankings! Able to turn the Coen brothers’ box-office weakling – No Country for Old Men, 10th in revenue this past weekend – into the maid of honor. (And, yes, I recognize that I’ve crafted a metaphoric non sequitur.) Enchanted still tops our rankings, but No Country was first in three of our four criteria, including per-theater average.
Things are awfully quiet around here. Too quiet. And that can only mean one thing: Culture Snob is busy preparing for the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon, which starts on Sunday, December 2, and runs for seven days. Or it could mean that I’ve been incredibly lazy this week.
Honestly and truly, I bear no antipathy toward Robert Zemeckis, although I wouldn’t want to sit through many of his movies, and even those I like are problematic at best. But I hoped fervently that something would prevent his Beowulf from leading the Box Office Power Rankings this week.
Since unveiling the Box Office Power Rankings in May, it’s become apparent that the Culture Snob system does what it was intended to do – expose crappy popular movies as the gold-plated turds they are and reward good movies that might not have as much marketing muscle behind them. But it’s still largely a disheartening experience, because it actually highlights the problems of the marketplace rather than correcting them.
