Cadillac Records opened this past weekend with a respectable $5,023 per theater, and got good reviews. It came in second place in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings behind only three-time winner Bolt, the unstoppable force that nobody cares about.
But because it was only in 686 theaters, it couldn’t make a box-office splash, earning $3.4 million overall and landing in ninth place. And because it was in 686 threaters, it was too big to be one of those only-in-major-cities movies that generate buzz and huge per-theater numbers. (Think Milk.)
If you believe (as I do) that perception plays a role in long-term performance, Sony/Columbia has done Cadillac Records a major disservice. It doesn’t smell like a turd, but on the surface it sure looks like one — yet only because of how it was released.
What might have been? Dreamgirls ($103 million in total domestic box office) opened in three theaters. Walk the Line ($120 million) opened in 2,961. Ray ($75 million) didn’t open wide wide (2,006 theaters), but it still managed a $20-million opening weekend.
| Box Office Power Rankings: December 5-7, 2008 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics’ Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | Bolt | 1 | 8 ($9.8M) | 7 ($2.8K) | 10 (84) | 10 (68) | 35 |
| 2 | Cadillac Records | - | 2 ($3.4M) | 9 ($5.0K) | 7 (64) | 9 (64) | 27 |
| 3 | Twilight | 4 | 9 ($13.0M) | 8 ($3.6K) | 4 (44) | 5 (56) | 26 |
| 4 | Quantum Of Solace | 3 | 6 ($6.8M) | 5 ($2.0K) | 8 (65) | 6 (58) | 25 |
| 5 | Four Christmases | 5 | 10 ($16.8M) | 10 ($5.0K) | 2 (24) | 2 (41) | 24 |
| 6 | Australia | 7 | 7 ($7.1M) | 6 ($2.6K) | 5 (52) | 4 (53) | 22 |
| 7 | Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa | 5 | 5 ($5.1M) | 2 ($1.5K) | 6 (62) | 8 (61) | 21 |
| 8 | Role Models | 8 | 1 ($2.6M) | 1 ($1.4K) | 9 (75) | 7 (59) | 18 |
| 9 | Transporter 3 | 10 | 4 ($4.7M) | 4 ($1.8K) | 3 (36) | 3 (51) | 14 |
| 10 | Punisher: War Zone | - | 3 ($4.3M) | 3 ($1.7K) | 1 (18) | 1 (30) | 8 |
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 than gross receipts alone.
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.
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