Sylvester Stallone’s 1980’s action flick throwback, The Expendables, easily kept its box office crown as a handful of new films failed to generate much excitement.  Overall the box office was down 5% from last year when Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds debuted to $38.1 million.

The Expendables earned an estimated $16.5 million, a decline of 52.6% from its opening frame.  In today’s heavily-hyped front-loaded market, a 52.6% first-to-second week drop qualifies a “solid box office performance” for an action film.  With $65 million already in the till, The Expendables, which reportedly cost $80 million to make, seems assured of breaking the $100 million mark domestically.

The top box office newcomer was the horror comedy Vampires Suck, a broad farce that pokes fun at the Twilight Saga and the current popularity of the bloodsucking class of the undead.  Don’t expect this film to have legs, it was excoriated by the critics (only 3% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) with many film pundits comparing it unfavorably to wretched amateur YouTube videos and public access cable shows.  The fact that it came in second place simply testifies to the public hunger for someone to make fun of the whole Twilight phenomenon—too bad it had to be writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.

Julia Roberts’ travelogue Eat, Pray, Love fell 48% and finished in third place in its second weekend, while Will Ferrell’s The Other Guys dropped just 42% in its third and finished fifth.  In between the comedy Lottery opened at #4 with the highest per theater average in the top ten, but it was only in 1,973 venues.

Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3-D scored with the critics (81% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but not with audiences.  Even though it had the horror audience all to itself, its $10 million opening pales in comparison to last year’s Final Destination, which also debuted in August, but earned over $27 million.  Still Piranha 3-D, even though it’s not half as clever as the original Roger Corman-produced Piranha (recently issued on DVD, see “DVD Round-Up: Week of August 3rd”), might find an audience since it does for 1980s exploitation horror films what The Expendables does for the Globus-style action films of the same decade.

Universal’s family comedy Nanny McPhee Returns generated just $8.3 million compared with the $14.6 earned by the first Nanny McPhee film in 2006.  With good reviews and a dearth of competition, it is possible that it could hang around in the top ten for a while, or it might have to find its audience on DVD.

The Jennifer Aniston/Jason Bateman comedy The Switch, which will, if you see it, never allow you to look at a turkey baster in quite the same way again, opened tepidly in eighth place, indicating that there must be better ways to publicize a film than getting in a shouting match with Bill O’Reilly.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception fell to number nine in its sixth weekend in theaters, but its gross only declined 32% as it added $7.6 million to its coffers and brought its domestic total to a whopping $262 million.  It probably won’t make $300 million, but this science fiction original has solidified its place as the surprise hit of the summer.

While, as previously indicated, a 53% decline from week 1 to week 2 is not a bad performance for an action film, it is not good news for a comedy.  Perhaps part of the problem was that Universal marketed Scott Pilgrim as an action film rather than as a quirky indie comedy, but it is certainly not a good sign that its per-theater average for its second weekend is less than Toy Story 3’s for its tenth.  The good news is that due to the differences in scale between the size of the audiences for movies and comics, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’s modest box office performance is still selling a whole lot of Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, which continue to dominate bookstore graphic novel sales—an effect that should be repeated when the film is released on DVD, where it might actually find the bigger audience it deserves.