Ugh. It was another terrible weekend at the movies -- attendance hasn't been lower at this time of year since 1999, according to Box Office Mojo. And no wonder: the movies on offer simply aren't very good. Even the top movie of the weekend, the casino drama 21, which earned $23.7 million, is, at best, a guilty pleasure. It made a stronger showing than other similar films recently, but on the same weekend last year, Blades of Glory made a lot more opening-weekend dough.

Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is hanging on, dropping only 29 percent in its second weekend to add $17.4 million to its total tally. Still, that's a smallish number in comparison to what it could have done -- it's only a little more than half of what, say, Ice Age did in its second weekend around the same time of year in 2002.

Beyond the top two, things look even more dire. Superhero Movie -- which wasn't screened for critics and sports a lousy 20 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes -- took on only $9.5 million. Meet the Browns, yet another terrible flick from Tyler Perry, earned only $7.8 million. Drillbit Taylor scraped up $5.8 million (though that represents a drop of only about 44 percent -- anything less that 50 percent is considered pretty good). And at No. 6, Shutter dropped about 49 percent to earn an additional $5.3 million.

Even art house and foreign films, usually bright spots at the box office, if on a much smaller scale than the Hollywood films, performed in what can only be called a lackluster way this weekend. The new release My Brother Is an Only Child had the weekend's best per-screen average -- $10,500, earned at a single theater in New York. No other limited release comes anywhere near that, or even anywhere near 21's per-screen of $8,950.

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MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
reviews, reviews, reviews! at FlickFilosopher.com

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