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It was not such a good weekend for The Golden Compass after all. On the one hand, it did finish first with $26 million dollars, well ahead of all the other movies. The bad news is that it ONLY made $26 million dollars! This thing cost something like $200 million to make, from what I read. How the heck are they going to make their money back if this is all they get? This movie is a FLOP.

I actually found out this movie was a flop when I went over to Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily website to get my usual writer’s strike news. I noticed that she put up a picture of a cartoon bomb (seen to the right) next to her report about The Golden Compass’s crummy numbers. You know — one of these things Wile E. Coyote might throw at the Road Runner. She was ranting about how the box office totals are so bad that they could get Bob Shayes, the chairman of New Line Cinema, fired.

See, this is why these box office totals are important. People get fired over this stuff — just like baseball managers or football coaches.

Anyway, that’s another week of my own predictions up in smoke. I had predicted $40 mil for this dud. So much for that.

I am sure lots of theories are going to fly about why this flick didn’t do better. For example, people will say there is a glut of fantasy movies, that too many people are still enchanted with Enchanted, that The Golden Compass came out at the wrong time of year — all the usual excuses will be tossed out there for human consumption.

I’m sure people will level the blame at Nicole Kidman again and say she can’t carry a movie. Just having Nicole’s name in the marquee is enough to repel people from the theaters. Nicole sure has been in a lot of flops lately, hasn’t she? There was Bewitched, and there was that other one this year called The Invasion. Maybe she’ll fire her agent.

I think another real factor could be this ongoing Writer’s Strike. A big-budget movie like Compass needs its celebrities doing the rounds of the late-night talk shows, promoting their movie with the likes of Leno, Letterman, Conan and Jimmy Kimmel. (Carson Daly came back, of course, but he’s on too late at night and nobody cares about him anyway.) Just think about the business this movie might have done had Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green et. al. been on Leno or Letterman drumming up interest in it.

Then again, maybe Nicole Kidman’s appearance on TV would have repelled even more people. Who knows.

Anyway, my point is that the Writer’s Strike is probably causing some collateral damage. If you ask me, this movie was underpromoted. And the reason it was underpromoted was because people were seeing 15-year-old reruns of The Tonight Show on TV instead of clips from this movie.

Here are the totals courtesy of Box Office Mojo:

I notice a lot of these movies are hanging on to a lot of their business. Maybe it’s because of no competition. Also, I notice the Christmas-themed movies like This Christmas and Fred Claus are doing pretty well as the holidays approach.

If you’re wondering, Juno made $420,000. In SEVEN THEATERS. Another new release, Atonement, did $817,000 in 32 theaters. These aren’t bad numbers, folks.

That’s all I have for now. Stay tuned for more movie box office news later this week at THE REJECT REPORT as we await the arrival of Alvin and the Chipmunks. (ALVIN?!?!)