Back-to-school busyness and the hangover from summer continue to keep the multiplex far from the minds of most potential moviegoers, and so we had another slow weekend at the movies. (We likely won't see another blockbuster weekend till Thanksgiving.) The third installment in yet another tedious video game adaptation, Resident Evil: Extinction was the most-seen movie this weekend, earning $24 million -- which was more than Laremy predicted on Friday. Watch for bad word of mouth to make this one drop like a rock next weekend. Still, it was more than Good Luck Chuck, the distasteful sex comedy starring the charisma-free Dane Cook, could manage: it came in at No. 2 this weekend with a paltry $14 million. And the less said about the weekend's other new wide release, the Amanda Bynes comedy Sydney White, the better: it barely scraped up $5.3 million to come in at the No. 6 spot.

The rest of the top five was a mixed bag of moderate victory. The preposterous Jodie Foster vengeance drama The Brave One dropped less than 50 percent this weekend, considered a certain measure of audience approval these days, when the studios push to get as many folks into theaters on opening weekend as possible; it earned $7.4 million to come in at No. 3. At No. 4 was 3:10 to Yuma, the riveting revisionist Western starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, which dropped less than 29 percent to earn $6.4 million. And the intense Mob drama Eastern Promises, starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by David Cronenberg, earned $5.7 million over the first weekend of its major expansion; the addition of nearly 1,400 new theaters combined with curiosity from moviegoers to give this one a boost of a whopping 950 percent.

Still, none of those numbers are particularly good, either. Yuma, for instance, still hasn't earned back its modest budget, and at this rate, it probably won't, which is a real shame. Had this been released at a different time of year, it might have done substantially better, though there's always the hope of critics' awards at the end of the year to boost interest. Other films that may be contending for those kinds of notices over the next few months are looking more auspicious: Into the Wild, writer-director Sean Penn's based-on-fact road drama arrived this weekend, earning a spectacular $51,750 on each of four screens. Another revisionist Western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt as the infamous outlaw, earned $28,800 on each of five screens. Resident Evil's per-screen, by comparison, was $8,486.

[Box office numbers via Box Office Mojo.]

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