I was looking around for the answer to this question, too. I was a little surprised at the ordering of the top couple of movies, and that got me wondering if "most popular" was normalized somehow. Are these the most popular from 2009? Were the numbers normalized for how long the movies were available via DVD?

If there's no normalization, then this gives a snapshot about movie popularity... something like a 1-D vertical slice from a visualization like one of these two:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...

http://xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html

I don't want to knock this new visualization, but I'm wondering what inferences would be safe to draw from the data as presented. It seems like it is most useful for comparing regions to each other; for instance, I was surprised at how varied the movie ordering was for adjacent neighborhoods in Manhattan.

if you're a netflix member you can get a (not so close) approximation at http://www.netflix.com/LocalFavorites