Box Office Power Rankings: November 23-25, 2007

enchanted.jpgThings 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.

Anyway, Disney’s Enchanted tops this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, placing first or second in all four criteria. The movie’s star, Amy Adams, has parlayed her Oscar nomination (for Junebug) into nascent stardom, in a movie that both critics and audiences like. Enchanted, indeed.

Box Office Power Rankings: November 23-25, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Enchanted (-; 10, 9, 10, 9: 38)
(2) This Christmas (-; 9, 10, 6, 8: 33)
(3) Beowulf (1; 8, 7, 8, 7: 30)
(4) American Gangster (1; 3, 3, 9, 10: 25)
(5) Bee Movie (4; 6, 4, 5, 5: 20)
(5) Stephen King’s The Mist (-; 2, 5, 7, 6: 20)
(7) Hitman (-; 7, 8, 1, 1: 17)
(8) August Rush (-; 4, 6, 3, 2: 15)
(9) Fred Claus (7; 5, 2, 2, 3: 12)
(10) Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (6; 1, 1, 4, 4: 10)

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.

No Comments

Leave a comment

Latest Twitter Review

  • ‘Dragon Tattoo’ has a damaged, sharp heroine; compelling depravity; a fair mystery; and no fat. But it’s oddly amorphous and fixated on rape
    > More Twitter updates

Recent Comments

  • See A.O. Scott’s NYT review for a “That guy wrote exactly what I think.” moment.
  • How many times did we have to revisit Saito not...
  • I think Leonardo DiCaprio worked on both this and “Shutter Island” due to his apparent credo of collaborating with top filmmakers.
  • Oh, I’m in complete agreement that a critic should talk about whatever he wants to talk, and that people should read criticism only after seeing...
  • Spoon: I certainly don’t dispute that a completely blind movie experience can be a lot of fun. This was written in reaction to the excessive...
  • “I believe that plot is but one element of each movie, and that, almost always, foreknowledge of the full story detracts little from the overall...

Most-Read Entries

Other Voices

I'm a LAMB

  • bt_assoc_grey.jpg
Close