Box Office Power Rankings: October 26-28, 2007

What the hell are Dane Cook and Juliette Binoche doing in the same movie? She, like Virginia Madsen, is commonly luminous, while he is merely overexposed.

The movie they share, Dan in Real Life, tops this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, while the weekend’s other major release, Saw IV, rode wretched reviews to a fifth-place finish.

And if you couldn’t tell from the first paragraph, I have little else to say on this topic.

Box Office Power Rankings: October 26-28, 2007
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Dan in Real Life (-; 9, 9, 7, 7: 32)
(2) Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1; 3, 8, 10, 9: 30)
(3) Michael Clayton (2; 5, 4, 8, 10: 27)
(4) Gone Baby Gone (3; 4, 5, 9, 8: 26)
(5) Saw IV (-; 10, 10, 2, 2: 24)
(6) 30 Days of Night (3; 8, 6, 5, 4: 23)
(7) Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (5; 6, 7, 4, 5: 22)
(8) We Own the Night (6; 2, 2, 6, 6: 16)
(8) The Game Plan (7; 7, 3, 3, 3: 16)
(10) The Comebacks (9; 1, 1, 1, 1: 4)

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

  • 2005’s ‘Stay’ is too aggressively off, fostering sensitivity to its head game rather than engagement in the story. Gosling holds it together
    > More Twitter updates

Recent Comments

  • Nathan: I prefer to look at the text rather than what the creator intended, or what the creator intended originally. And regardless of direct references...
  • I just watched “Magnolia” for the first time, and in the daze afterwards I stumbled on this article. I found it very interesting, but after...
  • If anybody is still reading this, there is LITERALLY what to this naive viewer appears to be a smoking gun (as in, a gun with...
  • Thanks, Culture Snob, for this excellent series of Magnolia analysis. Last night I watched it again for the first time in ten years, having seen...
  • Great post. Very relevant five years later - when we went through the financial crisis. Again there was loads of indignation but very little understanding...
    Clifford Jackman
    No School for Scandal

Other Voices

I'm a LAMB

  • bt_assoc_grey.jpg
Close