Laremy called for a "normal weekend" on Friday, but this weekend was anything but, and it's not just having that bonus Monday tallied in the count that's responsible for it. With no new wide releases opening on Friday, older films had some room to breathe, and they took fantastic advantage of it.

A "normal weekend" sees older films taking dramatic plunges in viewership -- this is so typical that for a film to drop "only" 30 percent is considered good; a film has to drop more than 60 percent for studio execs to start sweating. What happened this weekend? The top 12 movies all saw massive increases in attendance over last week: The weekend's winner, Night at the Museum, earned $46.7 million over the four-day holiday block; that's a jump of 53 percent. At number 2 was The Pursuit of Happyness, which earned $24.7 million, up 67 percent.

But wait: crowds were pleased all over the place. Charlotte's Web (No. 4), Blood Diamond (No. 11), and Casino Royale (No. 12) all doubled their audiences of the week before -- they saw 100 percent jumps in their attendance. (Happy Feet, at No. 9, was almost there, up 88 percent.) And even they have nothing on Dreamgirls, at No. 3 with a take of $18.7 million in only 852 theaters -- that's an increase of an astonishing 8,000 percent, and a per-screen average of almost $22,000.

No film this weekend could top that percentage boost -- and to be fair, it was the addition of 849 screens to the movie's release that is responsible -- but its per-screen was bettered by Pan's Labyrinth ($44,176 on each of 17 screens), Children of Men ($43,500 on each of 16 screens), and Notes on a Scandal ($25,000 on each of 22 screens).

I'd love to say that Hollywood will take note of these numbers and rediscover the way the industry used to sell movies: when you don't overcrowd the multiplexes and don't bombard audiences with new movies every week, it gives every film a chance to do well. And it's worth noting, too, that of those top 12 films, there are only two that are so terrible that I'd recommend giving them a pass (We Are Marshall and Eragon). But next week we'll be back to the same old pattern, with too many mediocre new flicks crowding out one another and the worthy older stuff. For at least one weekend, though, the one emotion prompted by looking at these numbers isn't despair, and that's a refreshing thing.

[Check out my reviews of many of these films at FlickFilosopher.com.]

(Box office numbers via Box Office Mojo.)

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