Sex in the City earned an estimated $55.7 million and scored an upset win over Indiana Jones at the weekend box office.  The film brought in a whopping $26.1 million on Friday before suffering declines on Saturday and Sunday, but overall it set a number of records including the best opening ever for an R-Rated comedy, the top romantic comedy debut of all time, and the best-ever bow for a TV adaptation.  The audience for the film was overwhelmingly female, which proves that you don’t have to appeal to all four “quadrants” to have a boffo opening—though it remains to be seen if Sex and the City will show enough “legs” to catch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and become the top romantic comedy of all time.

Meanwhile Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull dropped 54% (not really that big a decline for a film that opened so big), but still managed to earn an estimated $46 million and bring its cumulative to $216.8 million, making it the seventh fastest film to reach the $200 million mark. Universal’s The Strangers proved to be a very successful bit of horror counter-programming by earning an estimated $20 million and finishing in third place.

In its fifth weekend in theaters Marvel Studio’s Iron Man dropped just 31.5% and earned an estimated $14 million bringing its total to $276.8 million, which moves it into fourth place on the all time superhero movie list, trailing just the three Spider-Man movies.  It now appears more and more likely that Marvel’s maiden movie effort will top the $300 million mark.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian fell nearly 43% while earning an estimated $13 million during its third weekend in theaters and finishing in fifth place.  Driven by strong performances from the top five films, the overall total for the top 10 films was up a whopping 30% over the same weekend last year.