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The big box office guns were out in force, but failed to breathe any life into a slumping box office. Names like Mel Gibson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law and Jack Black all brought new product to the box office, and all failed to produce an opening above $15 million. With no serious entries since Casino Royale and Happy Feet debuted a month ago, the box office is left sagging, with next weekend looking like it could be the turnaround.

The number one film of the weekend is Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The Icon Productions, Touchstone Pictures production earned a slow $14.2 million this weekend from a tight venue count of 2,465. The film earned a venue average of $5,761. For a film told in the Mayan language, the debut is not all that bad; however, would this have been more embraced had Mel not lost it in a drunken rage a few months ago? Mel's last movie done in a foreign language did a little bit better, but he did have the church behind him for The Passion of the Christ, which opened to almost $84 million in February 2004. Apocalypto is more like Gibson's Braveheart, which opened to $12.5 million way back in 1995. I use Braveheart as a comparison as it opened on only 2,035 venues, and showed some decent legs before finishing with about $75 million and a Best Picture Oscar.

Legs for Apocalypto may be somewhat harder to come by than for Braveheart and The Passion. Apocalypto started with some fantastic buzz, but much of that buzz waned leading up to Apocalypto's release date. It finished the week with 122 reviews counted at RottenTomatoes, and 79 reviewers liked it enough to give it a thumbs up. That's only 65% fresh, although users are finding something more to get excited about at 78% fresh. The "Cream of the Crop" at RT, or the top reviewers in North America, liked it the least, giving it a 59% fresh rating. Like many of Gibson's films, critics can't get by the violence in the movie, which is turning some people off. The weekend multiplier (weekend gross divided by Friday gross) indicates that audiences like what they see, and are sending out some good word-of-mouth. After opening on Friday to about $4.9 million, Apocalypto finishes the weekend with a multiplier of 2.9, which means that Saturday and Sunday were quite healthy in comparison to Friday. We'll have to wait until next weekend to see if audiences are going to catch on to Apocalypto.

Finishing in second is The Holiday, the seasonal rom-com starring Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black. The Nancy Myers flick opened to $13.5 million, off the $16 million that Meyer's Something's Gotta Give found over the same period in 2003. The Holiday, a Sony release, opened at 2,610 venues, and found an okay average of $5,172. This was a safe choice for the movie's stars, and that choice led to some not-so-great reviews. The Holiday found more bad than good reviews at RottenTomatoes as 95 critics weighed in, and only 45 liked it. That gives this one a rotten 47% rating, which is off the 69% fresh rating that Something's Gotta Give had. Something's Gotta Give gave Sony a domestic total of over $124 million – can The Holiday do the same? It has no direct rom-com competition heading towards Christmas; however Charlotte's Web and Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness may cut into its demographic somewhat. Is this a $100 million dollar picture? Probably. Are we happy with that? I'll leave that one up to you.

Pulling up in third is Happy Feet, the animated Warner Bros. flick that spent three consecutive weekends at number one. Happy Feet caught the slide this weekend, pulling in $12.7 million, which gives it a percentage drop compared to last weekend of 28%. This is a huge improvement on last weekend's plunge of 53%. Currently, Happy Feet has earned a serious $137.7 million at the domestic box office, and could still find a domestic total as high as $160 million. That's not bad for a distributor who has shied away from animation and a production company (Village Roadshow) that has never produced an animated feature.

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