Overall, this weekend’s box office was down 28% from the same weekend last year, and I hope the conclusion film execs draw from this is “hey, maybe we should make better movies.”  Consider that the top seven films consisted of: the third sequel to a kid’s movie, another sequel, a rip off of at least five other films from the last five years starring Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl, a movie based on a video game, a sequel to a movie based on a TV show based on a book, a movie based on an unfunny one-frame comic strip, and a sequel to a movie based on a comic book, respectively.  Er, disrespectively.

The specifics (full top ten after the jump): Shrek Forever After landed on top for the second weekend in a row with $25.3 million.  Get Him to the Greek did decent business at $17.4 million (I saw it, it wasn’t life-changing, but pretty funny), Killers landed just behind that, followed by Prince of Persia and SATC 2, which both suffered big, 50%+ drops from their first weekend.  Marmaduke opened all the way down at number six, with just $11.6 million, which is a nice bit of schadenfreude, but not quite justice.  I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that whoever greenlit Marmaduke movie deserves to be homeless.  Ahh, but it wouldn’t be Box Office Wrap Up without some asinine, faux-scientific analysis.  How say you, BoxOfficeMojo?

Killers, wasn’t a disaster with an estimated $16.1 million on close to 3,300 screens at 2,859 venues, but it was less than the last two comparable movies The Bounty Hunter ($20.7 million) and Date Night ($25.2 million). While Killers was a commercial step backwards for lead actors Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher, it did speak to their bankability, considering that they were pretty much the only things going for the movie. Other than the use of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” Killers‘ advertising campaign was a nondescript blur and only conveyed that Kutcher’s character turns out to be a spy, followed by unexplained action. Killers was further hampered by its title: there was a dissonance between what the generic name “Killers” means and the marriage action-comedy presented in which only Kutcher is a killer.

So… it did less business than The Bounty Hunter and that somehow “speaks to the bankability” of Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher? How do you figure?  And of al the things wrong with that movie, you’re gonna bring up the f*cking title?  Well allow me to present a much more reasoned, thorough analysis. It’s a picture of a walrus blowing itself.

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It would’ve been virtually impossible to predict, but as it turns out, a weekend that opened with a fourth Shrek, a second Sex and the City, and a pastiche of tired Jerry Bruckheimer clichés didn’t exactly light people’s c*cks on fire.  In terms of attendance, it was the worst Memorial Day weekend since 1993, which of course opened with Pluto Nash Forever After.

Overall revenues for the top-50 films during the four-day holiday weekend came in at $192 million, the lowest since 2001. Factoring in today’s higher admission prices, about 24.2 million tickets were sold, the least since a 22.5 million head count in 1993.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s action tale “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” came in second with $37.8 million. Sarah Jessica Parker’s “Sex and the City 2,” which many thought would debut at No. 1, wound up in third with $36.8 million.

“When you have a Memorial Day weekend down this much, it just tells me the movies in the marketplace are just not grabbing people the way they have in past years,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.  [AP]

Wow, that’s a bold statement, Paul.  Good thing we have a “box-office analyst” to clear things up for us.  Lower attendance = less interest from the marketplace?  Who knew!  I would’ve thought lower attendance = sandwich.  Mmm, sandwich. ANYWAY, the silver lining in all this is that the flaccid sequel showings so far could softify Hollywood’s formerly stiff boner for superfluous sequels.  Penis.

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Macgruber mounted a big marketing push over the weekend, with ubiquitous internet ads and some viral  sites that I thought were actually pretty funny.  They took a concept I thought was really dumb to begin with (I never liked that sketch) and turned it into something I actually wanted to see.  But once again we learn that us internet cool kids aren’t the people driving the market, it’s that silent, drooling majority that make Jay Leno the number one late night host and Two and a Half Men the highest-rated sitcom (I tried to watch it on the plane the other day. Got through five minutes.).

Final tally? Macgruber: $4.1 million.  Letters to Juliet (not even in its opening weekend): $9.1 million.  Of course, I didn’t get around to seeing Macgruber yet either.  I was still planning to. Maybe it’ll bounce back?  Even if you think it looked stupid, it’s rough watching a broad, R comedy lose to Just Wright, the Queen Latifah rom-com.  WOOF. BoxOfficeMojo described Macgruber‘s opening as “a fraction of Undercover Brother and not much better than Delta Farce [the Larry the Cable Guy movie] among past comparable May titles.”

F*ck.  It hurt me just to type that, and I didn’t even work on the movie.  Elsewhere, Shrek Forever After won the weekend with $71.3 million, 61% of which came from 3D screenings.  When you factor in the even higher-priced IMAX showings, it was the lowest-attended opening for any Shrek movie, and down 59% from the last one.  You know what this means don’t you?  Time for a reboot with a younger voice cast.  Anyway, it’s a definite victory for $20 movie tickets.  (*sigh*) (*fart*)

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Shrek Dog always resented that showboatin' Puss in Boots Baby

Whenever people bitch about movies costing 10 or 12 bucks, I’m usually not on board — 10 bucks is still cheaper than any other form of entertainment outside pigeon kickin’ or rat spottin’.  But this weekend, some theaters in Manhattan will be charging $20 for tickets to Shrek Forever After, which is one of those movies people are only Shanghai’d into seeing by their mewling brood of wiener kids anyway.

Several theaters will charge $20 per adult ticket to IMAX showings of the animated 3-D family film “Shrek Forever After”.   The theaters include the AMC theater in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, AMC Loews 34, AMC Loews Lincoln Square and AMC Empire 42nd Street.

The increases weren’t officially announced, but were reflected in prices posted Wednesday on movie-ticketing Web sites such as Fandango.com and tracked by BTIG LLC media analyst Richard Greenfield.

While box-office revenues are up about 6% this year compared to the same period last year, attendance is slightly down—a reversal from several months of rapid expansion at the box office and a record-breaking year in 2009, when attendance was up more than 5% and revenues broke the $10 billion barrier.

Who the hell needs an IMAX screen to see Shrek?  The animation is already 3D, now you’re going to add another layer of depth to that, and blow up the whole thing on a 70-foot-screen?  How much stimulation do you need?  If I pay five more bucks, will Mike Myers sit next to me and poke me with a stick the whole time?  If I’m paying for my dumb kid to see Shrek, he’ll see it in Shut the F*ck Up-Vision™ or he’ll see it not at all.

The other day, FilmDrunkard David was kind enough to send me the above screencap from the RottenTomatoes reviews page for Shrek Forever After, showing that it had received only one positive review.  And guess who it is, surprise, surprise, our old friend Pete Hammond.   Here’s what Pete says about the film, broken into out-of-context quotes and with exclamation points added, the way he would want it:

“Hilarious and heartfelt from start to finish!”

“The best Shrek of them all!”

“Big laughs and emotion!”

“You can’t beat these beloved Ogres in brilliant 3D (for the first time) for pure entertainment this summer!”

“Shrek is without question the funniest film of the year-at least so far!”

Some of the previous films Pete Hammond deemed “funniest” of their respective genres include:

Heartbreak Kid (“Ben Stiller’s funniest film.”)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (“Woody Allen’s funniest film in years.”)

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (“The funniest movie I’ve seen all year.”)

Monsters vs. Aliens (“The year’s funniest comedy.”)

Up (“The funniest movie of the summer.”)

The Proposal (“Riotously funny! The Proposal is without question the year’s best comedy.”)

It wasn’t the first time he’d called something “pure entertainment” either.  (“Pure entertainment!” -City Island, “Pure entertainment with great music, wit and a dream cast!” -A Prairie Home Companion, “Pure entertainment from start to finish.” -High School Musical 3, “The most purely entertaining and inventive animated comedy of the year.” -Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs via).

Since the guy’s reviews are basically mad-lib collections of phrases that got him quoted in the marketing material of previous movies and he has no credibility, studios have stopped citing him as a source, saying it only detracts from the idea that reviews are meaningful in the first place.  Haha, just kidding, of course.