The weekend box office take of Fox's X-Men: The Last Stand dropped by a larger than expected 66.6% (isn't The Omen opening next week?) from $103 million in its opening frame to just $34.3 million.  The latest X-Men film fell to second losing the top spot to the poorly reviewed comedy, The Break-Up, which garnered an estimated $38 million.  Big second week drops are not uncommon with heavily promoted action films -- the first two X-films dropped 53 and 57% respectively in their sophomore sessions, but X3's jolting 66% decline testifies (as did its spectacular debut weekend) to a brilliantly orchestrated promotional campaign that included interactive commercials with The Simpsons and extensive play during the NBA playoffs.  The effect of this kind of uber-marketing is to 'front-load' attendance -- X3 has now earned more than $175 million in just ten days of release, but it appears unlikely to break the $300 million mark domestically.

Computer-animated features generally follow an opposite pattern to the steep declines of action flicks, and Dreamwork's newspaper comic-based Over the Hedge is no exception dropping just 23.7% to $20.6 million in its third week.  It should be interesting to see how Over the Hedge fares when Pixar's Cars opens next weekend.

The documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which is based on Al Gore's global warming power point presentation, earned the top per screen average ($17,298) for the second straight week, though it was only playing at 77 theaters.  It is still way too early to know if the film has Fahrenheit 9/11 or March of the Penguins-type potential, but it is interesting to note that not since the late 1920s have documentaries played such a major role at the box office as they have so far in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential, which earned just $109K over the weekend, look like it will finish its box office run somewhere just north of $3 million, and well shy of Ghost World's $6.2 million.