Rank
Title
Weekend
Gross
Cumulative
Gross
Weeks in
Release
1
$14,818,000
$14,818,000
1
2
$13,675,000
$77,148,000
3
3
$10,200,000
$10,200,000
1
4
Open Season
$8,000,000
$69,602,000
4
5
Flicka
$7,700,000
$7,700,000
1
6
The Grudge 2
$7,700,000
$31,380,000
2
7
Man of the Year
$7,035,000
$22,516,000
2
8
Marie Antoinette
$5,300,000
$5,300,000
1
9
$3,845,000
$35,954,000
3
10
The Marine
$3,725,000
$12,547,000
2

There are two stories this week – the story of the totals and the story of the per-screen average. The story of the totals is the more obvious one this week, and it has Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman opening their period magician movie at number one, and it has Clint Eastwood’s WWII film being unable to top Martin Scorsese’s three week old crime drama The Departed. In some ways that’s a nice little payback for Marty, who has lost his Oscar to Clint in the past.

But the real story is the per-screen. Flags of Our Fathers opened on a thousand fewer screens than what The Departed currently occupies, and it has a much higher per-screen (sadly this doesn’t make the opening any less of a disappointment, and – if you believe the early prognostiocators – a blow to the film’s Oscar chances). The Prestige beats both, though, and quite handily. In fact, The Prestige has a terrific per-screen, coming in third on the whole chart only behind Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D (19,000 bucks per screen! Amazing) and The Queen (15 grand! Very nice, a bona fide arthouse hit).

The rest of the chart is incredibly boring, except for Marie Antoinette, which opened in a sort of wide arthouse pattern that paid off – the film came in 8th but had the second highest per-screen of the top ten, trailing The Prestige by a couple of hundred bucks. And it’s nice to note that The Grudge 2 had a catastrophic 63% drop off from last weekend.

Next week’s number 1 film is Saw III – I don’t think anyone doubts that. But what happens to the other films on the chart, especially since that and Catch a Fire are the only films opening wide? The buzz on The Prestige is quite mixed, and Disney needs the Monday morning water cooler talk to be very strong – which is what’s keeping The Departed going strong.