This statement has a lot of caveats, but we’ll ignore them for now because it’s a fun story: this weekend, a film adaptation of the great American novel earned more than $50 million on the same weekend a Tyler Perry-produced romantic comedy earned less than $5 million. So this is what pleasant surprise feels like. Huh. Neat.

1) Iron Man 3, BV $72,472,000 Total: $284,893,000
2) The Great Gatsby, WB $51,115,000
3) Pain and Gain, Paramount. $5,000,000 Total: $41,608,000
4) Tyler Perry Presents Peeples, LGF $4,850,000
5) 42, WB $4,650,000 -Total: $84,732,000
6) Oblivion, Universal $3,864,000 Total: $81,655,000
7) The Croods, Fox $3,600,000 Total: $173,215,000
8) The Big Wedding, Lionsgate, $2,500,000 Total: $18,288,000
9) Mud, Roadside Attractions, $2,343,000 Total: $8,363,000
10) Oz The Great and Powerful, BV $802,000 Total: $229,985,000 [Indiewire]

I’d like to think the general populace was just too smart for a movie that once was called “Meet the Peeples,” which sounds like a fake Tyler Perry movie name generated by computer, and that sat on the shelf for a few years before it was released and generally looked pretty horrible, but let’s be honest, none of those things have ever slowed Tyler Perry down before. More than likely, his cultish fan base just didn’t realize or recognize it as a “Tyler Perry movie,” since he didn’t really do much to it creatively beyond stick his name on it. Peeples reportedly cost around $15 million, and almost certainly won’t make that back. It’d be nice if this slowed Tyler Perry down at all, or forced him to try to make better movies, but shit rolls downhill, so most likely it’ll probably just hurt the talented people who agreed to be in it, like Craig Robinson and David Alan Grier and Kerry Washington. Hopefully it won’t hurt much, because Craig Robinson is awesome. He nodded “sup” to me once at the Hollywood Improv. Cool story, huh.

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Ta da, it’s your invisible ticket.

The box office chugged along unremarkably this weekend, with a series of films no one much cared about doing middling business. Hopefully I’ve already hooked you with this lede. Oz is doing okay business, but it’s not the kind of Alice in Wonderland-style success Disney was hoping for. Meanwhile, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was either far from incredible or failed to make magic at the box office, depending on which hack headline you prefer. At $10.3 million, it opened half-again lower than even Semi Pro ($15.1 million), and made just a third of Blades of Glory’s opening ($33 million) on the same weekend in 2007 – thanks to BoxOfficeMojo for that thoroughly damning comparison. And that was all while side splitting and crowd pleasing its way to a rousing C+ Cinemascore. Jack Reacher, John Carter, Burt Wonderstone – hey, maybe stop naming movies after the lead character now.

I’m not sure studios are capable of making a decent comedy anymore. Every non-indie gets focused-grouped to hell, and running all your jokes by Joe Sixpack and Darla Diabetes first is a sure-fire way to ruin them. My favorite part of the Burt Wonderstone trailer was where they illustrated lackluster audience enthusiasm by using actual cricket sound effects. WE MADE A JOKE, DID YOU CATCH THAT, AMERICA? But for every Burt Wonderstone there’s an Identity Thief, 2013′s second-highest-grossing movie behind Oz, despite even worse reviews than Wonderstone. And if you’re only thinking short-term profit and not long-term health of the medium, that’s a win. It’s dumb. Come on, studio people, you’re going to be replaced in 18 months anyway, you might as well make movies you enjoy. It’s working for Megan Ellison.

1. Oz: The Great and Powerful (Disney) – $42 million ($144 mil. total)
2. The Call (Sony) – $17 million
3. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (Warner Bros.) – $10.3 million
4. Jack The Giant Slayer (Warner Bros.) – $6 million ($54 mil. total)
5. Identity Thief (Universal) – $4.6 million ($124 mil. total)
6. Snitch (Lionsgate/Summit) – $3.5 million ($37 mil. total)
7. 21 and Over (Relativity) – $2.7 million ($22 mil. total)
8. Silver Linings Playbook (The Weinstein Company) – $2.5 million ($125 mil. total)
9. Escape From Planet Earth (The Weinstein Company) – $2.4 million ($52 mil. total)
10. Safe Haven (Relativity) – $2.4 million ($67 mil. total) [Indiewire]

The one bright spot on the weekend was Spring Breakers, which opened in New York and LA, where it earned an impressive $90,000 per theater for Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures and distribution partner A24. That’s good enough per-screen average for 22nd all time. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that America loves art films. The people have spoken loud and clear, saying “we want a thought-provoking critique of crass commercialism!” Right? I mean that’s the only explanation. It could only be that or the underage tits.

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Forbes just released their list of the year’s 10 biggest flops (defining loss here as a percentage of budget, rather than total loss), which you can see below. The year is almost over, so there aren’t many films left that can out-bomb these bombs. All that’s left are Anna Karenina, Life of Pi, Twilight, Red Dawn, Rise of the Guardians, Silver Linings Playbook, Hitchcock, Killing Them Softly, Lay the Favorite, Playing for Keeps, The Hobbit, Hyde Park on the Hudson, The Guilt Trip, Zero Dark Thirty, Jack Reacher, Les Mis, Django, and Promised Land. Phew, okay, that’s actually a lot. But I believe in you, Red Dawn.

We used data from Box Office Mojo to see which films earned the smallest percentage of their budgets at the box office. Keep in mind that to begin to even imagine breaking even a film needs to earn at least twice its production budget at the box office. These 10 films didn’t come close. [Cloud Atlas is still in theaters, so it doesn't technically count yet, but I included it anyway.]

1. “The Oogieloves,” (Box office: $1 million; production budget: $20 million)

2. “A Thousand Words,” (Box office: $20 million; production budget: $40 million)/ “Cloud Atlas” (Box office: $24 million; production budget: $100 million)

3. “Dredd” (Box office: $28 million; production budget: $50 million)

4. “Big Miracle” (Box office: $25 million: production budget: $40 million)

5. “Wanderlust” (Box office: $21 million; production budget: $30 million)

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The Oogieloves in the BIG Balloon Adventure (as if “big” was the word that needed emphasizing in that phrase) narrowly edged out your mom’s crotch to become the worst opening of all time this weekend, earning just $445,000 on 2,160 screens. The only two things I knew about this film before today were that the producer was apparently inspired by people yelling at the screen during Madea Goes to Jail (no, really), and that the character on the right up there would kill my parents if I told anyone where she touched me.

It was pretty obvious that Oogieloves in the BIG Balloon Adventure wasn’t going to do well, but no one expected it to open this low. The movie earned an estimated $445,000 from 2,160 locations this weekend; that tops 2008′s Delgo ($511,920) for the worst debut ever for a movie in more than 2,000 theaters. It also had the second-worst per-theater average for a movie in nationwide release at just $206. To put that in perspective, if each location played Oogieloves five times a day on one screen at an average ticket price of $7, that would translate to fewer than two people per showing. [BoxOfficeMojo]

The fourth worst opening ever was for Major League: Back to the Minors, so you can understand why when Charlie Sheen was running his mouth about making another Major League movie a year or so ago, they were all calling it “Major League 3,” just ignoring the fact that there already was a Major League 3. And why not? It’s not like people were really looking for continuity in the Major League franchise. They already replaced Wesley Snipes with Omar Epps and just acted like they were the same person. Anyway, I digress. The Oogieloves trailer is after the jump, in case you want to feel like you’re tripping balls for a couple minutes.

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Let us enjoy this Brooklyn Decker gif and then never speak of this film again

I like to pretend that I’m smart and that I can predict what people are going to do, but of course I can’t, and almost every day shows me new ways that I can still be surprised by people’s stupidity. So while I’d love to say all along that I knew a movie based on a board game was a stupid idea of epic proportions, I just saw a commercial that said NCIS is the most-watched show on television, so what the hell do I know? I don’t even know someone who knows someone who watches that show. In any case, we were right this time, so let’s enjoy it: turns out Battleship really was a stupid f*cking idea. It grossed an estimated $25 million this weekend, on a budget of at least $209 million, not including marketing. For comparison, John Carter, which cost $250 million, and supposedly lost $200 million for Disney, made $30 million in its opening weekend. So, another way to put it is, Battleship got outgrossed by a movie that lost $200 million.

"More like BattleSHIT." -Gene Shalit's ne'er-do-well brother

Battleship already made $215 million overseas, and supposedly that’s going to mitigate the losses here, but I’d like to see how much they paid in advertising to make that happen. The ads were everywhere, even starstruck foreigners don’t see crappy alien movies unless you’ve beaten them over the head with it a couple million times. Any way you look at it, it looks like a loss.

And I’m sure there will be plenty of blame to go around, from Peter Berg to Taylor Kitsch (the poor bastard who managed to star in BOTH Battleship and John Carter), even though it’s not their fault. All to avoid the obvious truth: this was a really, really, really stupid f*cking idea for a movie. Like, really stupid. From the very beginning. But of course I’m biased. I don’t want Peter Berg to take the blame for this, because I would miss interviews like this one. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, Peter Berg should direct ALL of Hollywood’s idiotic, destined-to-fail crossover ideas. HURRRR, THESE FIG NEWTONS HAVE GREAT NAME RECOGNITION, SOMEONE OPTION THIS SNACK DRAWER.

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