300 Still Kicking The Weekend Box Office Down A Well

300 - the movie where the Phantom Of The Opera grows a beard, gets unusually angry and starts kicking black men into pieces on some sort of bizarre whim - is still the movie that everyone wants to see, as the weekend box office is showing.

Although getting nowhere near last weekend's $70 million weekend box office tally, 300 still managed to beat everyone else around to remain at the top of the weekend box office and further cement 300 star Gerard Butler's reputation as the figurehead for a new generation of right-wing, horribly violent action movies. That means he'll have 16 years of fame before making his Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and then another 16 years in the wilderness before he stages a triumphant return to fame with a movie called Leonidas Balboa, only to get arrested for taking human growth hormone to Australia a couple of months later. So it has been spoken.

Although the vast weekend box office takings that 300 has received for two weeks running would suggest that 300 was the first time that the Battle Of Thermopylae has been discussed in popular culture, that's completely not the case. There was the movie The 300 Spartans, references in The Last Samurai, Xena: Warrior Princess and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as well as being the basis for a particularly badly-remembered episode of Oh! Doctor Beeching. Here's the US weekend box office top five:

1 - 300 (Forget all this weekend box office nonsense - in a decade, people will only remember 300 for being the movie that got hecklerspray mentioned on the edition of Technorati Buzz TV that was unusually concerned with yellow hats) $31,185,000

2 - Wild Hogs (Still riding high in the weekend box office thanks to an especially misleading internet rumour about the movie consisting of a giant crow pecking John Travolta to death in slow motion) - $18,825,000

3 - Premonition (Sandra Bullock's husband dies, then confusingly refuses to stay dead until Sandra Bullock goes mad. Basically the whole film is a big allegory about Sandra Bullock's career after Speed II) $18,000,000

4 - Dead Silence (Who cares that Dead Silence is a monumentally hokey-looking film about serial-killing ventriloquist dummies? It's the first week in as long as we can remember where we haven't spent three hours crying because we can't think up another Terabithia joke) $7,771,000

5 - I Think I Love My Wife (It's Chris Rock's mature movie! That means that the word 'fuck' is only spoken 63 times and only 57% of the movie is concerned with hating women and white people. Or something) $5,751,000 

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Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo