Well, the order of finish this weekend at the box office looked very much like last weekend at the box office, with Four Christmases winning again with $18 million. The only surprise for me was the 63 percent drop for Bolt. I really didn’t see that one coming at all, so Bolt finishes third and it’s Twilight finishing second this week.

The new releases this weekend all did terribly. Punisher: War Zone finished with $4 million and Cadillac Records finished with $3.5 million. Nobel Son only brought in $371,000. The only movie with much to crow about is the Oscar contender Frost/Nixon, with a phenomenal per-screen average of $60,000. But it was only on three screens, so the haul ended up being $180,000. That is a LOT of money for three screens, folks.

Overall, though, it has been a very down weekend at the box office. We saw some big drop offs right across the board. In fact the drop-offs for Quantum of Solace, Madagascar 2 and Transporter 3 all exceeded 60 percent. Yes, I know last weekend was a holiday and so on and so forth, but you would think these flicks would still do a little better than that. It’s almost as if everyone decided to stay home and watch TV.

About the only movies that got more money than they did last week were Milk at $1,690,000 and Slumdog Millionaire at $1,406,000, but those two are still playing in less than a hundred screens. If these flicks had a wider release they’d be cleaning up, for sure.

The damages:

There really isn’t much more to add — it was kind of a boring week. Actually, make that a REALLY boring week. It sure looked to me as if moviegoers were taking the weekend off. I don’t blame ‘em, it’s getting too cold out.

See you later this week for another Reject Report — maybe The Day the Earth Stood Still will create some excitement and wake people up at the theaters this coming week.