Horton Hears Ka-Ching!

See? A G rating isn't so bad. "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" easily led the weekend box office, bringing in $45 million at just under 4,000 theaters, for a robust $11,400 per theater average. That's the sixth biggest opening ever for a G movie (gotta love those Box Office Mojo charts).By contrast, the live-action Thanksgiving turkey "The Cat in the Hat" opened in November 2003 with $38 million and a slightly lower PTA, while "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," the film that started Hollywood's current romance with the good Dr. (I'd call it more like date-rape, but never mind) opened November 2000 with a huge $55 million ($17.6K PTA).

What that means is a Seuss movie can do perfectly well as a G-rated computer animation with stars behind the microphone rather than decked out in latex and fur.

Other newbies didn't fare so well: martial arts drama "Never Back Down" ($8.6 million, actually pretty good given its low profile) and "Doomsday" ($4.7 million), the latter a movie not screened for critics by a gunshy Universal but that still got surprisingly high scores when the reviewers got around to seeing it. Michael Haneke's probably chuckling hollowly, as the success of the horror movie proves his point: We do love our cinematic violence but hate it when Austrian filmmakers play "Funny Games" and deliver it to us with a spanking. (The IMDb user comments are a graduate course all by themselves in how Haneke's re-do does and doesn't play. Fascinating reading, more so than the film in many ways.)

Other B.O. notes: "The Bank Job" is holding on surprisingly well: week 3 and it's still averaging $3,000 per theater. (So is "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," albeit at a third of the theaters.)

For more number crunching go to the Box Office Mojo charts and Leonard Klady at Movie City News. I think Klady puts it best this week; "Oscar season is officially over."