The PBCS Movie Standings: “Puss” Has Staying Power

After grossing just $34 million in its opening weekend against a $130 million budget, the PBCS standings deemed "Puss In Boots" a flop. Ah, but that was before this weekend, when the 3D-animated adventure grossed virtually the same amount. That kind of staying power will get you a little bump in our metrics, as you're about to see. Your box office figures look like this, according to Box Office Mojo:

1. Puss In Boots - $33.0M
2. Tower Heist - $25.1M
3. A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas - $13.1M
4. Paranormal Activity 3 - $8.5M
5. In Time - $7.7M
6. Footloose - $4.6M
7. Real Steel - $3.4M
8. The Rum Diary - $3.0M
9. The Ideas of March - $2.0M
10. Moneyball - $1.9M

As you can see, "Puss" triumphed over two heavily promoted newcomers this week, and that gave Antonio Banderas and his smoldering eyes a 105-point bump in our standings. Behold!

1. Paranormal Activity 3 - 555
2. Like Crazy - 518
3. Martha Marcy May Marlene - 464
4. Puss In Boots - 225
5. Margin Call - 222
6. Harold & Kumar - 142
7. Tower Heist - 101
8. Courageous - 89
9. 50/50 - 65
10. The Ideas Of March - 59

If I have one quibble with our formula (and really, we just made it up on the fly. It's pretty fallible, now that I think about it), it's that budgets might matter a bit too much. Three of the top five movies in our standings grossed less than one million dollars this weekend, but had their scores inflated by paltry budgets. That seems unfair. So from now on, I'm instituting a new rule. You MUST gross over a million bucks if you want to make this chart. Otherwise, you're not major enough for our little shell game. That would put "Puss" at #2 and give it proper credit for its triumph this weekend. By the way, PA3 is still going strong. We may not see the likes of it again--until PA4.

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