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Here are my thoughts on what happened this weekend at the box office, with Disney’s A Christmas Carol leading the way at $31 million.

I know the $31 million is lower than some people thought it would do, and Nikki Finke was freaking out this weekend with headlines bashing Jim Carrey and implying he had another flop on his hands, but to be honest most movies would kill for a showing like this.

I think the main reason it didn’t make it up to $40 million had a lot to do with the fact that it was released the week after Halloween and not at the usual times that these Christmas movies are released (ie. Thanksgiving). I guess they were going after the post-Halloween fright crowd with the darker subject matter and so on — but who’s kidding who, here. This is a Christmas movie and the Disney folks were simply hoping Christmas would come early.

The other new releases did about as well as could be expected, though The Box could really have done better. And really, I thought The Men Who Stare at Goats did pretty well considering it’s an Oscar season movie and the rest of it. I expect it to do steady business over the next few weeks.

Michael Jackson’s This Is It may have opened more modestly than expected but its business has been steady, and its $14 million haul is only a 39.7 percent drop from a week ago. All in all, not too shabby.

Uh, Paranormal Activity‘s gross is up to $97 million domestic and it should hit $100 million within days.

That’s pretty much it. The box office results are as follows:

1. A Christmas Carol (2009)-  $31,000,000
2. Michael Jackson’s This Is It – $14,000,000
3. The Men Who Stare at Goats – $13,309,000
4. The Fourth Kind – $12,521,000
5. Paranormal Activity – $8,600,000
6. The Box – $7,855,000
7. Couples Retreat – $6,428,000
8. Law Abiding Citizen – $6,172,000
9. Where the Wild Things Are – $4,225,000
10. Astro Boy – $2,588,00

That is all for now — back with more later this week with another edition of the Reject Report!