Where was everybody this weekend? Shopping? Who's got money to shop? Movies ain't cheap, but they're cheaper than buying a ton of crappy "gifts" at the mall for people who don't need them anyway. Sure, the first weekend after Thanksgiving is traditionally a slow one, as everyone recovers from turkey hangover -- not to mention the onslaught of new movies over the holiday -- but as Box Office Mojo notes, this was the least-attended post-Thanksgiving weekend in a decade.

The top three this weekend looked exactly like last weekend's. Disney's delightful romantic comedy Enchanted was No. 1 again, earning another $17 million; distantly behind at No. 2 and 3 were the urban family melodrama This Christmas, with $8.4 million (I'm shocked that this terrible film is doing so relatively well) and Beowulf, with $7.8 million. The CGI adventure is another awful movie, though its appeal is somewhat easier to understand. Still, it seems unlikely to earn back its $150 million budget.

The weekend's sole new wide release, the thriller Awake, couldn't do better than No. 4 and an anemic $6 million; the film wasn't screened for critics, though the few that caught it over the weekend have given it a sorry 12 percent Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. At No. 5 was last weekend's not-screened-for-critics entry, Hitman, earning $5.8 million; its current freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes is 13 percent.

The four returning movies in the top five all dropped more than 50 percent from last weekend. Ouch ... especially for Enchanted, which simply isn't turning out to be the smash hit Disney must have anticipated it would be.

Smaller films and Oscar hopefuls continue to do well in limited release, though. Debuting this weekend on four screens, The Savages -- a bittersweet dramedy about siblings played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney coping with their ailing father -- earned $153,000, or $38,250 per screen (Enchanted's per-screen was $4,563). And The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, newly arrived on three screens and based on a true story about a magazine editor's triumph over his disability, earned $75,300, or $25,100 per screen.

Everyone's staying out the path of The Golden Compass next weekend, but after that, all bets are off. With Christmas falling on a Tuesday, that gives us the functional equivalent of a "weekend" that's almost two weeks long, starting on Friday, December 21, and ending on Tuesday, January 1. Eight movies will open wide in that period (as well as the last of the awards bait). Yee-hah!

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

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