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.
At the outset, I will note that a perfect score says more about a movie’s circumstances than it does the movie itself. The Dark Knight was, by a hair, a better movie than Iron Man in critics’ eyes, yet it opened with WALL•E in theaters, thus blocking its chance at a 40 in our weekly contest.
Gran Torino joins the rarefied company of Iron Man and The Bourne Ultimatum with its Box Office Power Rankings perfection. (Our rankings were launched in mid-2007.) But it’s the lesser of the three. Eastwood’s movie has a combined Rotten Tomaotes/Metacritic score of 148, compared to Bourne’s 179 and Iron Man’s 171.
From that, we can see that Gran Torino benefited from relatively weak competition in the box-office top 10.
| Box Office Power Rankings: January 9-11, 2009 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics’ Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | Gran Torino | – | 10 ($29.5M) | 10 ($10.5K) | 10 (76) | 10 (72) | 40 |
| 2 | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | 1 | 6 ($9.2M) | 5 ($3.1K) | 9 (73) | 9 (69) | 29 |
| 3 | Marley and Me | 1 | 7 ($11.4M) | 6 ($3.3K) | 8 (59) | 7 (53) | 28 |
| 4 | Valkyrie | 4 | 4 ($6.6M) | 3 ($2.3K) | 7 (58) | 8 (56) | 22 |
| 5 | The Unborn | – | 8 ($19.8M) | 9 ($8.4K) | 2 (12) | 2 (30) | 21 |
| 5 | Not Easily Broken | – | 2 ($5.3M) | 8 ($7.3K) | 6 (42) | 5 (43) | 21 |
| 7 | Bride Wars | – | 9 ($21.1M) | 7 ($6.5K) | 2 (12) | 1 (24) | 19 |
| 8 | Yes Man | 6 | 3 ($6.0M) | 2 ($2.0K) | 6 (42) | 6 (46) | 17 |
| 9 | Bedtime Stories | 6 | 5 ($8.8M) | 4 ($2.5K) | 3 (23) | 3 (33) | 15 |
| 10 | Seven Pounds | 9 | 1 ($3.8M) | 1 ($1.6K) | 4 (27) | 4 (36) | 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 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.
