This just in: Chihuahua kicks DiCaprio's butt

(Bill Murray, either laughing or weeping at the box office returns for "City of Ember")

A little late on the box office report this week -- a combination of national holiday, ongoing fivethirtyeight.com addiction, and stunned response to "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" ($17.5 million) coming in at the #1 spot for the second week in a row against a debuting Leonardo DiCaprio/Russell Crowe action thriller ($12 million). Hell, the horror movie "Quarantine" did better ($14 million) than "Body of Lies," and that didn't even screen for the press.

Projections for the Ridley Scott film were much higher, perhaps double the eventual opening weekend take, so it behooves us to ask: Wha' hoppen? A number of things -- lovely weather, baseball playoffs, three-day weekend -- but I think the most important was that Warner Bros. promoted the film as an "important," Oscar-seeking, vaguely political thriller at a time when audiences desperately needed the fluffiest of fluff to distract them. Your 401K is in the crapper? Bringing on the talking chihuahuas and a stiff drink! Go to a horror movie and pretend the victims are bank presidents! Whatever you do, don't go see a film with datelines. The irony is that "Body of Lies" got pasted by a lot of critics expecting something heavyweight, when in fact it's a perfectly servicable genre film that attaches itself to current events like a tick to the underside of a dog. No more, no less.

Also somewhat shocking was the failure of inspirational football biopic "The Express" to squeeze out more than $4.5 million. I guess it screams "wait for the DVD," but the too-serious-for-me effect noted above may have also come into play, since the film's being marketed as a sports flick and a civil rights lesson. When in doubt, audiences chose the talking chihuahua, maybe not on another weekend but certainly on this weekend.

Kids' fantasy flick "City of Ember" (photo above) didn't do much, with a $3.1 million that didn't even crack the Top Ten.

An interesting per-theater-average stat to note: Down around the number 10 spot and below, where PTAs routinely start sloping off to the low one-thousands, both Christian marital drama "Fireproof" and atheism comedy-documentary "Religulous" are posting high-$3,000 per-theater-averages. This is called playing to the home crowd.

And speaking of high PTAs, there are a few monsters down in limited-release land. "Rachel Getting Married" went from nine theaters to 27 and racked up an average of $16,500 at each. Guy Ritchie's return to form (say some; I haven't seen it yet) "RocknRolla" averaged $21K at seven theaters, and Mike Leigh's portrait of a bubbly eccentric, "Happy-Go-Lucky," managed an $18.5K PTA at four theaters. ("RocknRolla" and "Happy-Go-Lucky" open in the Boston area this Friday.)

Here's the Box Office Mojo chart, and here's Leonard Klady at Movie City News.