A film based on the videogame Doom, starring the 'Rock,' took the number one spot at the weekend box office, but Hollywood's yearlong slide continues as the gross for the top 12 films lagged behind the total for the same week in 2004 by a large margin.

Grosses for the top 12 films for the month of October are the lowest in six years, indicating that the box office slide of 2005 is escalating.  Doom did well with its intended audience -- 69% of the audience was male and 61% was under 25 -- but the film's opening does not compare with those of previous videogame-based films such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider ($47.7 million), Mortal Kombat ($23.3 million) or even Resident Evil ($17.7 million).

A couple of films of interest to pop culture retailers continued to cut against the grain and do well.  Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit slipped only 24.5% while earning an estimated $8.7 million to bring its total to over $44 million.  Although Tim Burton's Corpse Bride crossed the $50 million mark and eclipsed 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, it is clear that Wallace & Gromit will take home the stop motion animation crown for 2005. The remake of John Carpenter's The Fog starring Smallville's Tom Welling only dropped 38%, which is an excellent performance for a horror film in its sophomore session, while David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which is based on the DC graphic novel written by John Wagner, remained in the top ten dropping only 25%.

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask dropped just 8.7% as it added 7 theaters and brought its cumulative total past the half-million dollar mark.