George Clooney, they say, is the perfect movie star. He's handsome, charming, socially aware, a critical darling and lightly self-deprecating.

Trouble is, nobody goes to see any of his movies. You may have thought that this instalment of the weekend box office would be all about Leatherheads, the knockabout screwball sports comedy that George Clooney stars in and directs.

But no - Leatherheads lost out at the weekend box office to last week's US weekend box office number one 21. George Clooney, then – officially not as good as shit films about maths that nobody could possibly come close to liking.

It's with sadness that we report that Leatherheads – the aggressively-promoted movie directed by George Clooney and starring Clooney, Renee Zellweger and the bloke from The Office – couldn't beat 21 at the weekend box office, even though 21 lost almost 40% of its audience from last week and is clearly rubbish.

But, hey, George Clooney's allowed a rare commercial flop now and again. We'll just put Leatherheads alongside The Good German, Good Night, And Good Luck, Intolerable Cruelty, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, Solaris and Predator: The Concert and move on. Here's this week's US weekend box office top five…

1 – 21 (Not to be confused with similarly numerical movie The Number 23, although God knows it'd be nice if Jim Carrey staggered in halfway through 21 and stabbed everyone to bits) $15,100,000

2 - Leatherheads (Perhaps Leatherheads suffered from not having enough mentions about the war in Darfur in it. Note to George Clooney – try boosting the DVD potential by inserting a bit in the middle where you turn to face the camera and say "But what about Darfur?") $13,485,000

3 - Nim's Island (Knowing nothing about Nim's Island, we watched the trailer to find out more. And, hey, it's a Jodie Foster film about a woman trying to protect a child. Who'd have thought?) $13,000,000

4 - Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (The moral of Horton Hears A Who, of course, is that a person is a person no matter how small. Even if they're not a person and they live on a piece of some dust. Remember that, it's important) $9,100,000

5 - The Ruins (Another film about how Americans shouldn't really every go abroad. But because scorpions crawl inside their bodies and not because they sit on the tube and shout about not being able to see a station called Buckingham Palace like you thought) $7,840,000

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Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo