This graph shows Shia LaBeouf’s score on our annual analysis of leading stars at the box office. The Star Score represents points assigned to each of the leading stars of the top 100 movies (based on box office) in the current year and two preceding years. For appearing in the number one movie in a year a star gets 100 points, the number two movie 99 points and so on..
Latest Ranking on Selected Box Office Record Lists
It is a busier week than usual for theatrical releases, with twelve of them in total. Unfortunately, most of them are earning reviews that are merely good, or worse. Much worse in some cases. The few films that have the reviews strong enough to thrive are the wrong genre for the pandemic era. Hopefully films like I Used to Go Here will do well enough in VOD, but don’t expect much in theaters.
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It is not a good week for limited releases. There were so few films that had 10 or more reviews that I had to bend the normal rule and even then, there are only nine films on the main list. Of these, Honey Boy easily has the best chance of box office success. However, I’m also interested in Good Girls Get High, KonoSuba - God’s Blessing on the Stupidly Long Name, and The Kingmaker. Let’s hope they all find audiences.
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It’s another slow week for limited releases, so I stretched my usual rule regarding the minimum number of reviews needed to make the list. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth watching coming out this weekend. There are two documentaries earning perfect or near-perfect reviews, Vision Portraits and One Child Nation. There are a couple of Chinese films coming out, The Bravest and Dying to Survive. There’s even an Anime title on this week’s list, Love Live! Sunshine!! The School Idol Movie Over The Rainbow. However, The Peanut Butter Falcon is the film with the best shot and earning some measure of mainstream success.
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There are not many limited releases that have a shot at box office success on this week’s list. The biggest ones are either opening too wide, like Beirut, or are already playing on VOD, like Borg vs. McEnroe, Wildling, and others. This leaves Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami as the film I think has the best shot at earning some measure of mainstream success.
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Here at The Numbers, we strive to improve your reading experience by adding more features we believe you will find interesting. Today, we have two new features to talk about. Firstly, we have a series of new acting records for the various categorizations we use. For example, the highest grossing leading actors in films based on a TV show. The number one actor is Shia LaBeouf, who starred in the first three Transformers movies. Number two is Tom Cruise, who is the star of the Mission: Impossible franchise, while number five is Justin Long, who provided the voice for the titular character in the Alvin and the Chipmunks films. Starting to notice a pattern? Nearly everyone on the top of this list is someone who starred in one TV adaptation that turned into a lucrative franchise. The only exception is Simon Pegg, who has been in two of these franchises: Mission: Impossible and Star Trek trilogy.
There are not a lot of limited releases on this week’s list. Things to Come is earning the best reviews, but it is a foreign-language film and that will limit its box office potential. Believe is the biggest in terms of theater count, but it’s a faith-based film and there’s a chance it will open well below the Mendoza Line. On the other hand, Jackie has the best box office potential and Natalie Portman could win an Oscar for her performance.
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The Independent Spirit Awards nominations were announced last night and thus the 2016 Awards Season begins. There were a few surprises and some snubs to discuss, but for the most part, there’s not a lot nominations that broke the established narrative. It’s because there isn’t really an established narrative. This means films that earn nominations here have a much better chance of doing well going forward and Moonlight looks like it could rise up as a result.
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September is over and while it got off to a bad start, a really, really, truly terrible start, it actually ended on a bit of a strong note. Granted, no film has yet to reach $100 million, but The Maze Runner and The Equalizer both could get there in the end. As for October, we might go another month without a $100 million hit. There are a couple of films that have the potential to reach the century mark, Gone Girl and Fury. Hopefully they will get there, but given the recent box office woes, it is probably best to keep expectations low. Last October, there were two films that earned more than $100 million. Bad Grandpa just made it passed that mark. On the other hand, Gravity was a monster hit earning nearly $275 million. It you compare its run to this year's batch of films, it only ranks behind Guardians of the Galaxy. ... There's no way any film opening this month is going to match that. ... There no way the top two films will match that. ... The top three films might not match that. ... 2014 is going to get crushed in the year-over-year comparison and by the end of the month, it will be safe to say its chances of ever catching up to 2013 will be over. It is going to be a depressing month.
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If you look at our list of franchises, none have made more money in as few installments as Transformers has earned. On the other hand, if you look at the top ten franchises, none of them have earned as much critical scorn as the Transformers films have earned. Only the first one managed to come close to overall positive reviews. Depending on who you talk to, the most recent installment, Transformers: Age of Extinction, has been called the best of the sequels or the worst of the sequels. Which camp do I fall under?
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The home market picks up steam this week, sort of. We are starting to get some of the Awards Season hopefuls coming out, which is great news for fans of great movies. However, there's not a lot of depth to go with the award-worthy movies. The two films that were the main contenders for Pick of the Week were Captain Phillips on DVD or Blu-ray Combo Pack and In a World... on DVD or Blu-ray. It was a close decision, but in the end, I went with In a World...More...
On Tuesday we launched The Numbers Bankability Index, a new service to help assess the value that different people bring to the industry, from actors and actresses to directors, screenwriters, producers, and anyone else involved in the creative process of making a movie. In this article, I'll look more deeply into how the Index is compiled, and how we use the tools behind it to analyze questions about people in movies.