It would be news only if Shrek the Third hadn't broken box office records this weekend. So it's hardly news at all: Biggest opening ever for an animated film with $122 million in its till from Friday through Monday. The record it broke belonged to Shrek 2.

But you know those not-very-nice things we say about the other kind of broken records, right? Critics have been hauling out the bad puns for the headlines of our reviews to illustrate our disappointment at how pedestrian the movie is: The third time? Not so charming and What a piece of Shrek and of course my own All ogre the guy. At only 43 percent Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes -- ouch -- most of the reviews can be summed up with a quick quote from critic Joshua Tyler at Cinemablend.com: "Shrek has become a part of the homogenized mediocrity it was railing against in the first place." Double ouch.

But lowest-common-denominator sells, even more so than Laremy expected on Friday -- he called for the film to make $102.5 million. But I can take heart in the fact the Shrek, for all its $122 million, did not have the best per-screen average of the weekend. The Irish musical romance Once, playing on two screens, beat out Shrek's $29,597 per-screen with its $30,250. Hoorah. Distant third and fourth -- but still very respectable -- are the delights Waitress (I finally posted my review), with a per-screen of $9,784, and Paris, je t'aime, with a per-screen of $8,944. (By contrast, the weekend's No. 2 film, Spider-Man 3, earned $28.5 million but with a per-screen of only $6,591.) I'm glad to see that some adventurous moviegoers took my Friday advice to seek out these smaller films.

(Box office numbers via Box Office Mojo.)

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