Weekend Box Office

As the summer cinema bonanza heads into a sleepy home stretch box office numbers continue to lag. No amount of smash holiday hits could hope to bring this year's overall sales up to the level of last year. All we can do is sit back and watch to see if Hollywood will take some drastic action or continue to churn out bomb after bomb, praying that this year is a fluke, just another phenomenon to blame on El Nino or the Michael Jackson trial.

It's a rather uneventful week in the top ten. Without too much surprise The Dukes of Hazzard, despite only being a mediocre film, took top honors. It's good to open on a weekend with no competition.

March of Penguins continues to rise in the charts. At this rate it may very well end up making more money domestically than The Island. Everybody brace yourselves for the next trend wave in filmmaking: animal documentaries. I suspect it's only a matter of time before Universal or Warner Bros. creates a Ranger Rick division and starts churning out films like Ride of the Buffalo or The Llama Story. Quick, go out and see Penguins before it becomes a the trendy thing to do.

Two new films this week make big splashes in little ponds. Bill Murray's latest foray into drama, Broken Flowers grossed a remarkable $745,000 despite only showing in 27 theaters. Foreign romantic-epic 2046 starring Zhang Ziyi did even better, earning about $118,000 while showing on only 4 screens. No word yet on how big a release either film will get following such massive preliminary successes, but expect both to climb the chart somewhat in the coming weeks.

Next week Four Brothers and Deuce Bigalow 2 take the screen. It's completely possible that American's fascination with Jessica Simpson's, er, talent may keep the Duke boys at number one. Another great release coming up is The Great Raid. With a limited release don't expect to see it near the top, but having seen it I can tell you it deserves to do well.

'