Rank
Title
Weekend
Gross
Cumulative
Gross
Weeks in Release
1

The Grudge 2
$22,000,000

$22,000,000
1
2

The Departed
$18,675,000

$56,626,000
2
3

Man of the Year

$12,550,000

$12,550,000
1
4

Open Season

$11,000,000

$59,154,000
3
5

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

$7,750,000

$30,457,000
2
6

The Marine

$7,000,000

$7,000,000
1
7

The Guardian

$5,853,000

$41,119,000
3
8

Employee of the Month

$5,600,000
$19,910,000
2
9

One Night With the King

$4,326,000
$4,326,000
1
10

Jackass Number Two

$3,334,000
$68,383,000
4

Marty does it! While The Departed couldn’t hold on to the number one spot in the face of the onslaught of 14 year old girls looking for cheap jump scares and their dates looking for cheap excuses for skin to skin contact in The Grudge 2, Scorsese’s return to crime had a heroic 30% drop off between weekends. You usually see movies taking a 50%+ hit on their second weekend; factoring in the fact that the film did very well midweek (meaning strong word of mouth) it looks like The Departed could very well have legs – supposing that it doesn’t get totally lost in the shuffle after next week. But more on that later.

Man of the Year, the political comedy lacking politics, somehow managed to open higher than many expectations, but you can’t expect it to last very long. Open Season chugs along, proving that audiences don’t care what you put in your CGI film about a generic set of wild animals. Snore. And you can expect to see more Leatherface, since the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre film is happily turning a profit for New Line, despite being awful in every possible way.

At the bottom end of the chart The Marine, the weekend movie most appealing to the retarded, opens with 7 million bucks. I don’t know what this movie could have made if it had gone down its natural path – direct to DVD – but even this amount indicates a frightening number of Americans with cerebral damage. This is offset somewhat by the quick trip Employee of the Month is taking off the chart. The movie has made too much to destroy Dane Cook’s career or to finally send him to Guantanamo, but it hasn’t made enough to push him above being a B-lister.

The big surprise this weekend is One Night With the King, which isn’t about fucking fat Elvis but rather the Bible. This is pretty much all I know about it, since it’s a radical right wing Christian movie that doesn’t do outreach to heathen sites like CHUD. Or AICN. Or Yahoo Movies. Anyway, the film makes an impressive showing for a niche picture showing on only 909 screens. And it managed to beat the sheerly Satanic Jackass Number Two, which has made more than the first film, but not by much.

Next week sees some major releases. Flags of Our Fathers will be out, and will probably disappoint audiences unless people are clamoring for lots of crying men. The Prestige hopes that The Illusionist has disappeared from your memory, and Marie Antoinette is banking on theatergoers being smarter than the asswipe critics who have dismissed this beautiful film as shallow.