Box Office Power Rankings: January 23-35, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire has slipped in and out of the Box Office Power Rankings since the weekend starting December 19 – spending four of those weeks in the rankings and two weeks out. It seems telling that this past weekend, Millionaire again came out on top of our rankings, five weeks after it initially won. In both cases, Slumdog’s victory accompanied a significant increase in the number of venues at which the movie was playing – 169 to 589 on December 19, and 582 to 1,411 on January 23. But there’s also evidence that the Danny Boyle-directed movie has been able to maintain public interest and enthusiasm over an extended period of time, beyond simply expanding its release.
When people talk about Oscar snubs, they’re usually speaking emotionally. But we can quantify snubs, at least when it comes to Best Picture. You’ll need to accept one major assumption: that critics in the aggregate are good arbiters of the quality of films. Here is a list of movies – the Best Picture nominees, other serious contenders, and a few never-weres – ranked by their combined scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
A reliable rule for critical aggregators is that Rotten Tomatoes will almost always be a more extreme number than Metacritic. Put another way, the Metacritic number will generally sit between the Rotten Tomatoes number and 50. This is a function of the up-or-down Rotten Tomaotes system compared to the shadings allowed by Metacritic. (A three-star review is fully positive to Rotten Tomatoes, but only three-quarters positive to Metacritic.) There are so few significant exceptions that it’s worth noting when they crop up. In this week’s Box Office Power Rankings (won, for a second consecutive week, by Gran Torino), there are two: Notorious and Defiance. They both scored 52 at Rotten Tomatoes and significantly higher (61 and 58, respectively) at Metacritic. The obvious explanation is that while critics were roughly evenly split on the movies, those who liked it liked it more than those who didn’t like it didn’t like it. Less stupidly, each got marginally negative reviews and enthusiastic positive ones in equal measure. But I wonder if these special cases speak to some sort of critical fear.
In 2008, only one movie got a perfect score in the Box Office Power Rankings: Iron Man, twice in May. In the second weekend of January, we already have our first perfect score of 2009: for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.
In last week’s Box Office Power Rankings, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button finished two points ahead of Marley and Me. They were third and first, respectively, in overall box office, and one point apart in the per-theater standings. This past weekend, they were again third and first in box office, and again one point apart in per-theater average. Nothing opened wide. So how did Marley and Me catch Button to create a tie for this week’s crown? The distance between them was only two points, so it didn’t take much – just a few critics, in fact.
As 2008 exited, withered and old and tired, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was birthed into theaters, fully formed as a Best Picture favorite. Among the