What's this? The Giants win the Super Bowl, and the top movie of the weekend is a tween brat singing in 3D. Signs of the apocalypse, surely.

Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour took in $29 million this weekend, which is an astonishing figure for Super Bowl weekend, which is usually given over to unscary horror movies that typically take in less than $20 million, often less than $10 million. But the Disney flick did even better than it sounds: the movie earned that $29 million at only 683 venues, which just barely qualifies as a wide release, making Hannah Montana's per-screen average of $42,459 the best of any new wide release, ever. Better than the Spider-Man movies. Better than Pirates of the Caribbean. Better than Star Wars and Harry Potter and Shrek and The Matrix.

Now that is scary.

But it's probably an anomaly. The far-distant No. 2 movie, The Eye, is more like what we usually see on Super Bowl weekend. Unscary horror? Check. Less that $20 million? Check: The Jessica Alba flick earned $13 million. And the rest of the slate is just a wasteland of movies that hardly anyone went to see. The No. 3 movie, 27 Dresses, took in a paltry $8.4 million, and it just gets worse from there. The other new openings couldn't even break the top 10: Over Her Dead Body, an unfunny, unromantic romantic comedy, clocked in at No. 11 with $4.6 million, and Strange Wilderness (which was not screened for critics, as The Eye wasn't, either) could barely manage No. 13, with a little over $3 million. Even all the Oscar contenders -- There Will Be Blood, Atonement, No Country for Old Men, and so on -- did pretty poorly, and you have to imagine that they weren't getting a lot of competition from the Super Bowl.

It was just a weekend to nest, I guess.

Looking forward to what's opening in coming weeks, I'm not seeing anything with great potential to make a big splash at the box office till maybe 10,000 B.C. in March. Should be a quiet month at the movies...

[Box office numbers via Box Office Mojo.]

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

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