Title Weekend Per Total
1 Hellboy II: The Golden Army $35,885,000 $11,200 $35,885,000
2 Hancock $33,000,000 (-47.3%) $8,322 $165,034,000
3 Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D  $20,580,000 $7,321 $20,580,000
4 Wall-E $18,509,000 (-43.1%) $4,808 $162,772,000
5 Wanted $11,586,000 (-42.2%) $3,669 $112,045,000
6 Get Smart  $7,105,000 (-36.0%) $2,302 $111,468,000
7 Meet Dave $5,300,000 $1,760 $5,300,000
8 Kung Fu Panda $4,300,000 (-41.2%) $1,590 $202,043,000
9 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl $2,357,000 (-28.5%) $1,274 $11,046,000
10 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull $2,250,000 (-40.4%) $1,352 $310,477,000

This just in: We’d like to offer a correction to last week’s story. It was parachutes, not prostitutes. Which, when you think about it, makes a heck of a lot more sense.

You could see it coming from a couple miles away, but it’s always shocking when it happens. And that is how 20th Century Fox let Meet Dave die. My guess is the confusion among market-testing with the title Starship Dave got too frightening to Fox (“wait, it’s got a spaceship? Where is it?” “Dave is the Starship” “Wait, you’re going too fast… how can a person be a starship?”) when you’re dealing with something so high concept to begin with. This appears to be doing Holy Man business, which means it’ll wrap up around $12 Million, where Pluto Nash opened to $2 Million, and closed out around $4 Million. So Eddie Murphy can say fairly that this is not his biggest sex bob-omb.

On the opposite side of things is Hellboy II. The first fillm opened in April to a little over $20 Million. Both marketing departments had an uphil battle, but where Universal’s put some titles out in time-frames that knocked them the fuck out, here they got a great opening, and should be able to at least get to $90 Million when all is said, done. This speaks well for Del Toro, who may not need the cushion that doing a project like The Hobbit guarantees. Then again, it’s good to be safe. So you say to me, Dre (that’s me, by the way), “how’s a film like this doing its production budget a good thing?” Well, with DVD and foreign and TV sales, the film will be profitable. “Yeah but aren’t all films profitable?” Well, I don’t know if Meet Dave will ever turn a profit (side note: I was  a plane where you can select what movies you’re watching, and a couple of the films were The Avengers and After the Sunset. My guess is that’s how you squeeze nickles out of films like that, the studio offers a package deal with a couple winners and a couple losers, and everyone goes home happy), but if Hellboy is considered a winner for hitting $90-$100 Million because of those cushions, then, it is one. Let me say that again: if it is considered successful for that threshold, then it is. If Meet The Spartans cost the same amount and did the same amount it would likely be considered a black eye. What mkes the difference? Everyone knows that Guillermo Del Toro is an artist, and that the repeat factor will be that much higher. Or the whole system of judging these numbers is arbitrary. Either/or.

Hancock didn’t drop 50%, which is success in the sense that WOM was decidedly mixed, and not exactly awesome with the critical community. though Godwin’s Law was never invoked. But the film also had a five and a half day opening weekend, so it spread its number around. I Am Legend got to $256 Million, and that number is out of reach, but somewhere over $230 should be good enough. Where that may be Wall-E ends up, unless it really starts leveling out and playing for the rest of the summer. It hasn’t really opened internationally yet, it’s just warming up in that regard, so there’s that, and the DVD/Blu-Ray sales will be rather high.

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D looks like a dump, and there may be too much Brendan Fraser on the plate for someone who’s almost an accidental movie star. But this should have no real effect on The Mummy. Strange how that works. Wanted is over $100, and may get closer to $140 when all is said and done. The franchise will likely be determined by the success of other markets, etc. It’s just on the cusp of being successful enough to go forward with that. But it’s also a million ahead of Get Smart, which it will likely be within spitting distance of when all is said and done. Warner has got to be happy with that, especially considering Universal had to limp, limp, limp Evan Almighty to $100. Kung Fu Panda crossed into $200 this weekend, and may yet prove more successful than Wall-E. Them’s the breaks. Kit Kitteredge will hang out until next weekend, as will Indy, which is finishing out its impressive run, and may have just enough juice left in the tank to get past Iron Man.

But, the problem is this: As the internet tells us the greatest film in histoy of the world opens on Friday, and from all early word it makes Orson Welles look like Tristam Shandy, Howard Hawks look like Shirley Temple, Gregg Toland like Bunny Yeager, and Robert Bresson like Uwe Boll. This fucker is known to cure leukemia, and autism. Perhaps even Aspbergers? That I can not say. Anyway the suction of that film opening should cause the polar ice caps to re-freeze, and it should open to $400 Million easily, and then do $450 the next weekend. It’s just that good. Space Chimps should revolutionize how we think of cinema. and I’ll talk more about it come Thursday.