Weekend Box Office: The movie 3D was made for

"Jackass 3-D" made $50 million over the weekend. I'll say that again: "Jackass 3-D" made $50 million.

Since it cost $20 million to make, the MTV-derived stuntapalooza is already in the black, as compared to "RED," which cost $60 million to make and brought in an opening-weekend take of $22.5 million. Guess which business model will be driving studio executives going forward?

"Jackass" had a number of things going for it to account for that gross (sic). Surprisingly indulgent reviews, for one thing, not that that matters to the core audience. More to the point, the movie was on a ton of screens (4,600) at a ton of theaters (3,081). Over half of those screens (2,452) showed the film in 3D, and the combination of higher ticket prices and audiences unaccountably wanting to experience the illusion of precious bodily fluids being sprayed directly at them meant that that 53 percent of 3D-ready theaters took in 90 percent of the take. And that resulted in a curiously bifurcated pair of stats: "Jackass 3-D" now holds the record for highest-grossing Fall (Sept.-Oct.) opening but, due to padded 3D ticket prices, "Scary Movie 3" still holds the record for highest attendance.

Whatever; the movie still made $20 million more than industry observers were expecting it to. Not that "RED" was a piker: Estimated to come in around $15 million, the geriatric-spy movie performed better than acceptably -- I'm guessing it was all those fans of Helen Mirren in "The Queen" -- and if it won't do "Expendables" numbers ($38 mill opening weekend, $102 total US gross) -- it'll make back its nut.

Among returning movies, "The Social Network" is holding up well in week three, adding a few theaters and mustering the interest to make $11 million over the weekend. It's still the only de facto Oscar-buzz film in the offing, which at the very least distinguishes it from "Jackass 3-D". And "Secretariat," down only 25 percent in week 2, is showing exceptional legs, surprising only if you A) haven't seen the movie and B) don't understand that its core audience of older moviegoers doesn't care about getting to a movie in the first week.

In the arthouses, a pair of documentaries are holding sway: Public-education screed "Waiting for 'Superman'" adding more theaters and still pulling in over $4,000 per screen in its fourth week out, and Wall Street scourge "Inside Job" making over $9,000 per at ten theaters in week two. The big per-theater kahuna, though, was Clint Eastwood's spook-drama "Hereafter," which averaged $38,500 at its six houses on the wave of some seriously split reviews; it expands to the rest of the country this Friday.

More box office numbers from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News' Leonard Klady, and further spelunking of critics' statistics at the estimable Movie Review Intelligence.