Why Bother?

Erik Lundegaard in Slate has a piece where he strenuously tries to show...well, I'm not sure what. He throws around a lot of numbers to prove that the best-reviewed films make the most money. Then he starts using per-screen stats, which aren't really the proper measure.

In any case, what's the point? It's still true that critics, in general, give an extra bump to "art" films over popcorn films (often for good reason--I'm not saying it's simply snobbery), but even accepting how Lundegaard looks at the numbers, it doesn't tell us much. Of course reviews track well with popularity, adjusting for genre--critics, like fans (they are fans), prefer a good popcorn movie to a bad one, and that's true whether or not they're snobs. This is pretty much all Lundegaard shows, but he seems to believe he's done something more.