Funny how, with the box office so pathetic lately, a tiny bit of an uptick looks like reason to celebrate. The Forbidden Kingdom -- the delightful martial arts Wizard of Oz-esque adventure/comedy -- scored a little under $21 million from Friday through Sunday ... which isn't great if we compare similar films and similar weekends of recent years, but it's pretty good compared to how poorly most movies are faring lately. And even though the romantic disaster comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which earned $17.3 million, this weekend, didn't do anywhere near as well as other similar flicks from the Judd Apatow gang, hey, it still earned something that looks like an opening-weekend box office take, numbers that have been in short supply of late.

Below the top two, though, it's the same old wretchedness we've gotten used to. The horror remake Prom Night, at No. 3, dropped like a stone in its second week, taking in $9.1 million. And at No. 4, the debut 88 Minutes -- the Al Pacino thriller that wasn't screened for critics -- earned only $6.8 million (Editor's Note: Actually they screened it for film.com, though they probably wish they hadn't!). At No. 5, the kiddie adventure Nim's Island is a relative bright spot, still holding moderately strong in its third week, dropping less than 40 percent to add $5.7 million to its total take ... though it's going to have a tough time even earning back its modest budget of $37 million by the time it's finished.

(Speaking of non-benchmarks for movies that might have expected to play bigger, a look at the weekend's full results shows that Horton Hears a Who! won't pass $150 million domestically, and 10,000 B.C. won't pass $100 million domestically. Though Horton has at least earned back its production costs; 10,000 B.C. won't get anywhere near that mark.)

As is almost always the case, particularly on a weekend when a comic-book movie starring Will Smith isn't opening, it's an indie that takes the best per-screen average. The Visitor, filmmaker Tom McCarthy's follow-up to The Station Agent, took in $9,055 on each of 18 screens (The Forbidden Kingdom's per-screen, for comparison's sake, was $6,623). The Visitor expands next weekend, and with its competition featuring two wide releases that won't even screen for critics, it's looking like a continued surefire winner, if only on a small scale.

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

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