Hannah Montana, meet Daniel Plainview.
In my absence, I’ve let the Box Office Power Rankings slip, so here are three weeks’ worth. And we get the strange chart-topping pair of There Will Be Blood (January 25-27) and Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (February 1-3 and 8-10).
Hannah, this should go without saying: Keep close watch over your milkshake.
Box Office Power Rankings: January 25-27
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) There Will Be Blood (-; 2, 8, 9, 10: 29)
(2) Rambo (-; 9, 9, 5, 5: 28)
(3) Cloverfield (1; 7, 4, 8, 8: 27)
(4) Juno (2; 4, 2, 10, 9: 25)
(4) 27 Dresses (3; 8, 5, 6, 6: 25)
(6) Meet the Spartans (-; 10, 10, 1, 1: 22)
(7) The Bucket List (4; 5, 3, 7, 4: 19)
(8) Untraceable (-; 6, 6, 2, 2: 16)
(9) National Treasure: Book of Secrets (8; 3, 1, 4, 7: 15)
(10) Mad Money (10; 1, 7, 3, 3: 14)
Box Office Power Rankings: February 1-3
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (-; 10, 10, 8, 7: 35)
(2) Juno (4; 5, 6, 10, 9: 30)
(3) There Will Be Blood (1; 1, 8, 9, 10: 28)
(4) 27 Dresses (4; 8, 7, 5, 6: 26)
(5) The Eye (-; 9, 9, 3, 3: 24)
(6) Rambo (2; 6, 4, 4, 5: 19)
(7) Cloverfield (3; 2, 1, 7, 8: 18)
(8) The Bucket List (7; 4, 3, 6, 4: 17)
(9) Meet the Spartans (6; 7, 5, 1, 1: 14)
(10) Untraceable (8; 3, 2, 2, 2: 9)
Box Office Power Rankings: February 8-10
(Rank) Movie (last week; box office, per-theater, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic: total)
(1) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (1; 8, 10, 8, 8: 34)
(2) Juno (2; 6, 5, 10, 9: 30)
(3) Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (-; 9, 8, 4, 7: 28)
(4) There Will Be Blood (3; 1, 6, 9, 10: 26)
(5) Fool’s Gold (-; 10, 9, 2, 2: 23)
(6) 27 Dresses (4; 5, 3, 6, 6: 20)
(6) The Eye (5; 7, 7, 3, 3: 20)
(8) The Bucket List (8; 4, 4, 7, 4: 19)
(9) Rambo (6; 3, 1, 5, 5: 14)
(10) Meet the Spartans (9; 2, 2, 1, 1: 6)
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.
