Weekend Box Office Review (11/07/10): Megamind, Due Date, For Colored Girls open well, 127 Hours explodes in limited release.

There weren't a lot of surprises at the box office this weekend. Megamind opened right in line with most Dreamworks animated originals, with $46 million. The standard for non-sequels in the Dreamworks cartoon library is $43-47 million. Opening just below A Shark Tale ($47.6 million) and Madagascar ($47.2 million), the supervillain epic has the fifth biggest opening for a non-sequel in the Dreamworks animation catalogue, also behind Monsters Vs. Aliens ($59.3 million) and Kung Fu Panda ($60.2 million). It was their ninth-biggest animated opening overall. More impressive was the 3.68x weekend multiplier, which is one of their biggest weekend multiplier in recent memory.

Weekend box office (10/17/10): Jackass 3-D sets October, documentary records, while Red opens strong.

Jackass 3-D grossed a whopping $50.3 million in its debut weekend, setting several records and setting punditry tongues wagging in the process. First of all, the film bested the $48.1 million opening weekend for Scary Movie 3 in 2003, taking the October opening weekend record. Second of all, the opening figure is far and away the best opening weekend for any kind of non-fiction/documentary film in history. If you count this series as a documentary franchise (which I do), then the third entry is now the fifth-highest grossing documentary in history in just three days. It stands behind Jackass: The Movie ($64 million), Jackass Number Two ($72 million), March of the Penguins ($77 million), and Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119 million). While the franchise has mediocre legs (part one had a 2.9x weekend-to-total multiplier in 2002 and part two had a 2.4x multiplier in 2006), thus making $100 million+ not quite a sure thing yet, there is little doubt that the film will end its domestic run as the second-highest grossing documentary/non-fiction film of all time. Still, 3-D films seem to have better legs than average (witness the useless My Soul to Take dropping just 54% in weekend two, as well as the inexplicably strong holds of Legends of the Guardians, now at $46 million), partially because they keep the bigger auditoriums for longer periods of time. If it can manage a mere 2.4x multiplier, it will in fact surpass the Michael Moore anti-Bush epic.

Why do we care about, let alone hate, Megan Fox?

News broke yesterday that Megan Fox would in fact not be a part of Transformers 3, which is set to be released on July 3rd, 2011. Before any real details could be articulated, the media at large jumped on the idea that Fox had been fired by Michael Bay in relation for various statements that Fox had made over the last several months that appeared to criticize Mr. Bay. Needless to say, word soon spread, via HitFlix and People, that Fox had actually chosen not to return to the rampaging-robots franchise of her own accord. I have no idea which version is true, and I imagine we'll know in the coming weeks. But the sheer outpouring of joy that greeted the allegation that Fox had been canned for trashing Michael Bay in public was more than a bit obnoxious. The same geeks and entertainment columnists who called co-star Shia LeBeouf honest and gutsy for criticizing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) were basically applauding the idea that Fox had been fired for basically doing the same thing. Why do so many people hate Megan Fox? Who do they even care?