Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps topped the weekend box office with an estimated $19 million, while Zack Snyder’s Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole debuted in second place in spite of the extra coin provided by more than 2,400 3-D locations.  Overall the box office was up 4% from the same weekend last year, but the total of the top ten films failed to reach $90 million for the fifth week in a row.

The top two films appealed to widely different demographics.  Sixty-five percent of the audience for the Wall Street sequel was over 30, with the crowd split evenly between males and females.  Snyder’s owl movie, which is based on a popular series of YA novels, attracted an audience that was 54% female and 56% under 25.  The fate of Snyder’s film will depend on word-of-mouth, but it already appears that it may have to do much of its damage on disc.

Last week’s winner, Ben Affleck’s The Town remained solid, dropping just 32.7%, and posting the highest per-screen average in the top ten, while the teen comedy Easy A was off just 40%. 

The other new film this week, the romantic comedy You Again opened poorly and landed in fifth place.  In its third weekend, the zombie saga Resident Evil: Afterlife fell 51% and ended up in seventh.  The fourth Resident Evil film has already become the top-grossing entry in the series, but you can chalk that it to higher 3-D ticket prices, because in terms of the total number of attendees, it still ranks dead last.

But 3-D is no guarantee of success as the animated Alpha and Omega can attest.  It fell 48% in its second frame and has just brought in $15.1 million, a performance that makes Legend of the Guardians look good in comparison. 

Christopher Nolan’s Inception finished at #10 making it the first film from 2010 to spend 11 weeks in the top ten.