Weekend Box Office (09/04/11): Adult films trash the cheap exploitation fare and dominate Labor Day weekend, as The Help and The Debt defeat Shark Night and Apollo 18.

Summer must be over, as grownups as seemingly returning to the marketplace.  In what was always going to be a light moviegoing holiday weekend, the low-key adult thriller (on 1,826 screens) defeated the more heavily advertised and wider-playing genre entries.  First of all, The Help once again topped the box office for the third weekend in a row ($19 million for its four-day holiday weekend, with a $14.6 million Fri-Sun total, actually rising 0.5% from last weekend).  I'm not sure what the record is for the most consecutive weekends at number one for a movie that did not debut in first place, but the crowd-pleasing period drama has to be high on the would-be list.  With $123 million in a month, the film now sits as the eighth-highest grossing drama of all-time released in the summer, a list that becomes even shorter when you discount war-themed action pictures (Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, Gladiator).  It is still outpacing Bridesmaids by a significant margin ($106 million after four weekends) and could very well flirt with $180 million if it can hold onto screens and fend off adult-skewing pictures (Warrior, Contagion, Moneyball) in the next month.