If you glance at the box-office top 10 this week, you might think that the supernatural romantic comedy Ghost Town was a bomb, finishing last among the four major new releases and eighth overall. But the movie's title was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Paramount/DreamWorks only exhibited it in 1,505 theatres - a sure sign the studio doesn't believe in the movie. (Its opening-weekend competitors - Lakeview Terrace, Igor, and My Best Friend's Girl - were all released in more than 2,300 theatres.)
Given a wider release and more marketing money, Ghost Town would likely have been a modest hit, easily making back its $20-million production budget in theatres. Consider that it was second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 (behind only The Dark Knight), and that audiences liked it, too. Yahoo! users rated it B+ (compared to grades of B and B- for the other three big releases), while users of the Internet Movie Database gave it a 7.5 out of 10 (compared to a range of 5.2 to 6.5 for the new-release competition).
It's unlikely that Ghost Town would have overtaken Burn After Reading in our Box Office Power Rankings this week with a more aggressive release, but its performance would have better reflected how people actually felt about it. This is a poster child for mis-released movies.
About Box Office Power Rankings
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. I assign equal weight to box office and critical opinion, with each having two components. The measures are: box-office gross, per-theatre average, Rotten Tomatoes (RottenTomatoes.com) score, and Metacritic (Metacritic.com) score.
Why those four? Box-office gross basically measures the number of people who saw a movie in a given weekend. Per-theatre 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.
For more Box Office Power Rankings, visit CultureSnob.com/bopr. Culture Snob is the Web site of Reader Managing Editor Jeff Ignatius.
| Box Office Power Rankings: September 19-21 | |||||||
| Box Office Ranks | Critics' Ranks | ||||||
| Rank | Movie | Last Week | Gross | Per Theater | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Total |
| 1 | Burn After Reading | 1 | 9 ($11.0M) | 9 ($4.2K) | 8 (79) | 8 (62) | 34 |
| 2 | Lakeview Terrace | - | 10 ($15.0M) | 10 ($6.1K) | 5 (40) | 5 (46) | 30 |
| 3 | Ghost Town | - | 3 ($5.0M) | 6 ($3.3K) | 9 (86) | 9 (72) | 27 |
| 4 | Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys | 2 | 5 ($7.3M) | 8 ($3.5K) | 7 (53) | 6 (49) | 26 |
| 5 | The Dark Knight | 3 | 2 ($2.9M) | 2 ($1.5K) | 10 (95) | 10 (82) | 24 |
| 6 | Igor | - | 7 ($7.8M) | 7 ($3.3K) | 4 (28) | 4 (42) | 22 |
| 7 | My Best Friend's Girl | - | 8 ($8.3M) | 5 ($3.2K) | 1 (8) | 3 (36) | 17 |
| 8 | Righteous Kill | 5 | 6 ($7.4M) | 4 ($2.4K) | 3 (22) | 3 (36) | 16 |
| 9 | The House Bunny | 6 | 1 ($2.7M) | 1 ($1.0K) | 6 (41) | 7 (55) | 15 |
| 10 | The Women | 8 | 4 ($5.4M) | 3 ($1.8K) | 2 (10) | 1 (27) | 10 |
