Weekend Box Office (12/04/11): With no new wide-releases, Twilight tops, Muppets drop, and smaller films (Shame, Descendants, Artist) take center stage.

As is sometimes the case with the post-Thanksgiving weekend, studios did not offer up a single new wide release.  While that's understandable considering the customary huge drops that the holdovers take this weekend, it's frustrating this year considering the sheer amount of product being released over the last ten days of the year (does Summit really expect The Darkest Hour to strike huge over Christmas weekend?).  Anyway, to the surprise of some (including me), a larger-than-expected drop for The Muppets allowed Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part I to top the box office for the third weekend in a row.  The fourth film in the saga grossed $16.9 million, for a drop of 60% and a cume of $247 million.  While it's still trailing the respective end-of-third weekend totals of New Moon ($267 million) and Eclipse ($255 million), it had the largest third weekend of the franchise and a slightly smaller drop than New Moon (which tumbled 64% in weekend three for a $15 million weekend).  So while it still may end up trailing the last two pictures, it has a fighting chance to end up awfully close to the $295-300 million range of the prior sequels.  It's also just ahead of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I, which had $244 million at this point and eventually crawled to $295 million.

07/16/99 - When the studios blew the best chance to legitimize the NC-17.

As seems to happen every year, bloggers, critics, and pundits are up-in-arms over an Oscar-bait film being awarded or threatened with an NC-17.  As usual, the film in question is a critically-acclaimed adult film with strong sexual content.  And once again, the many people arguing about this are missing the real problem.  Yes, it's annoying that ultra-violent horror films like Saw VII get R ratings while adult films with somewhat explicit sexual content get NC-17 ratings.  And yes it's annoying when somewhat more sensationalistic sexual content like that found in Black Swan gets an R while the apparently mature and allegedly thoughtful sexual content in Steve McQueen's Shame gets tagged with an NC-17.  But the problem is not with the rating, but with the enforcement of said rating.  Put simply, if major theater chains were willing to carry NC-17 pictures and mainstream media outlets would carry advertising for NC-17 pictures, then the debate over what film got what rating would be moot.  As it is, the problem with the NC-17 is not its seemingly arbitrary application (IE - far more likely for sex than for violence), but how it is viewed by the industry and the general moviegoers.