Taking in a huge $101 million on its worldwide opening, Michael Jackson's This Is It — a concert film drawn exclusively from rehearsal footage — has now extended its intended two-week run in theaters through Thanksgiving. Maybe now the American audience won't drag its ass. The $21.3 million domestic total for the weekend was enough to hit No. 1 and send the hot-hot-hot Paranormal Activity to second place, with $16.5 million, even on Halloween. But, please, America, your middling interest in This Is It almost had the late King of Pop eating the dust of the OMFG dreadful Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds 3-D Concert Tour.

Read Peter Travers' review of This Is It

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Pinch me. I must be hallucinating. A truly great movie, the Spike Jonze film of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, hit the box-office No. One spot, a space usually reserved for the wretched likes of Couples Retreat or the violently stupid Law Abiding Citizen, which had to settle for runner-up status. How did quality win out?

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With stars like Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, how can a scary movie miss? I'm kidding. But no one's laughing at the major cash being pulled in by Paranormal Activity, with zero star power, a micro budget of $15,000 and a director, Oren Peli, with no experience outside of programming software. There hasn't been this kind of heat generated by an unknown horror cheapie since The Blair Witch Project hit pay dirt ten years ago. Paramount started the viral buzz (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) a few weeks back with midnight screenings in a dozen college towns. Shockingly, folks lined up to watch a babe (Featherston) and her boyfriend (Sloat) get freaked out by noises in their San Diego home, inciting him to set up a night vision video camera while they sleep to catch what's out there. That's it.

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Photo: Columbia Pictures
Just when horror seemed about to lay down and expire at the box office (RIP Halloween 2 and Jennifer's Body), along comes Zombieland to revive a rotting carcass. Audiences forked over $25 million this weekend to watch Woody Harrelson and his pals (including that big star in a surprise cameo) kick zombie ass. Ringing the No. 1 bell, Zombieland trounced Ricky Gervais's Invention of Lying ($7.4 million) and left Whip It — the much-hyped directing debut of Drew Barrymore — winded and sucking for air ($4.5 million) And whoops — how did this happen? — the critics were just as stoked as the public by Zombieland, which scored a huge 89 percent of favorable reviews, according to the website rottentomatoes.com.

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I don't know which news is worse: That the box-office crown for the five-day July 4th holiday weekend was won by an inferior animated film, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, with $67.5 million in the till. Or that an inferior robot film, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which took in $65 million from Wednesday to Sunday, is now the highest-grossing movie of the year so far, with $293 million collected in just a dozen days. Since Trans 2 isn't slowing down, Michael Bay's attempt to kill all that's human in cinema looks like the machine that will define popular film taste in the year 2009. Talk about a tacky time capsule.

I prefer to focus on better news: The continued success of UP ($265 million so far) — come on Pixar, bite Bay on the ass. The impressive performance of Kathryn Bigelow's brilliant Hurt Locker in limited release. And the way Michael Mann's Public Enemies refuses to be written off as an art film geared to the snob set. Starring a superb Johnny Depp as gangster John Dillinger, Public Enemies took in a sturdy $41 million in its first five days. That means a lot of you out there shelled out the cash and saw it. Here's a thoughtful letter I received that reflects problems I'm hearing about the movie:

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Miracles do happen. A good movie — make that a great movie — hit the No. 1 spot this weekend. That's right, Pixar's latest animated masterwork, Up, had the helium to fly off with $68.2 million. That kicked the lazy ass of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian to second place. If only Up had dragged that Ben Stiller sequel to hell. Last night on the MTV Movie Awards, even Triumph the Wonder Dog referred to Museum as torture right to Stiller's face. I'll second that cigar-smoking mutt.

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As I predicted, along with a bunch of you guys on Twitter, cute trumped carnage this Memorial holiday weekend. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian took in $70 million over four days to seriously outgun Terminator: Salvation, which grossed $53.8 million over the same Friday to Monday frame. What happened? To quote star Christian Bale's tirade against the T4 director of photography on the set last summer: "what don't you fucking understand?" As I see it, Museum attracted family audiences with its wuss-friendly PG rating.

On the other hand, Terminator fans were put off that T4 also carried a relatively wussy rating, PG-13, the first in the franchise to not go out with a hardcore "R" on its hood. In fact, T4 director McG didn't wuss out. His first entry into the franchise stretched that PG-13 way past its usual limits. Maybe guys 25 and older — the target audience for T4 — were diverted by televised basketball playoffs this weekend. Or maybe the continued success of Star Trek, tickling $200 million in just three weeks, also siphoned off the core demographic. Or maybe it was the latest box-office gimmick: giant screens. T4 had no IMAX showings. Museum had several, including sellouts at DC's Smithsonian Museum itself, accounting for $5.4 million in take home.

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Crazy question? Not really. Ron Howard's megabudget Angels & Demons did indeed take in $48 million on its opening weekend, enough to just squeeze ahead of Star Trek in its second week. But read between the lines and you don't quite come up with a success story. That $48 million gross for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, once again starring Tom Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, is substantially below the $77 million that Da Vinci took in on its debut weekend in 2006. Dan Brown's Angels & Demons was a definite bestseller, but it only sold half the 80 million copies of Brown's Da Vinci Code. Worse, it barely stirred up an iota of controversy. Da Vinci posits that Jesus was married with children, making Angels' claim of anti-scientific bias in the Catholic Church seem like small potatoes. Ironically, the faster-paced film version of Angels received marginally better reviews than the slogging chunk of anti-cinema that was The Da Vinci Code on screen. But if money talks in Hollywood, it's writing a dimmer box-office future for Angels & Demons.

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Photo: Paramount Pictures

Star Trek, refashioned by director J.J. Abrams into an origin story even a non-Trekker could love, beamed up a big $76.5 million at the weekend box office. Expect a sequel to be announced pronto and salary hikes for Chris Pine’s Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Spock. Many fans were rooting for the gross to break $100 million and put the newbie in reach of last summer’s Iron Man. But the miracle didn’t happen — yet! Star Trek is, let’s face it, a tired franchise. A paltry $30 million debut for 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact was the best opening in the 10-film series, until now. Thanks to Abrams and his young cast, the Starship Enterprise is looking good to live long and prosper. Which begs the question. What is the best Star Trek movie and what is the one you wouldn't watch again even with a gun at your head?

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The Queen is dead! Long live the King! Zac Efron has just killed Miley Cyrus! At the box office, I mean. Efron's 17 Again, a comedy devoid of comedy and originality (hello, Big!), hit No. 1 this weekend with a hefty take of $24 million. Zac zapped Miley's climb with Hannah Montana: The Movie, which tumbled 61 percent in its second weekend with $12 million and a fourth place finish. No smiles for Smiley Miley. Allow me to note that State of Play, a savvy political thriller which was predicted to tank on its debut, scored 2nd place with a respectable $14 million. Dare I hope for the future? Nah. I know it's a freak thing.

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