In what the Wall Street crowd might call a flight to quality, North American audiences made The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend's box office champ by spending 70.1 million dollars on the superb third installment of the Matt Damon franchise. Expect across-the-board great reviews and excellent word-of-mouth to keep Bourne afloat for the rest of the summer, especially now that the release schedule is lightening up a bit. The Simpsons Movie nose-dived 65% after an auspicious opening, adding 25.6 million to run its total to 128.5 million.

One of the weekend's other newcomers, Underdog, failed to significantly connect with the kid audience it needed and managed to pull in only 12 million bucks on a weak sub-$4000 per-screen basis. It probably didn't help that the only kids who knew who in the hell Underdog was are now in their thirties and forties. Chuck and Larry (10.5M, 91.6M), Hairspray (9.3M, 78.9M), Order of the Phoenix (9.2M, 260.7M), No Reservations (6.5M, 24.1M) and Transformers (5.9M, 296.3M) all showed good relative strength as hold-overs.

The weekend's other two big newcomers, Hot Rod and Bratz: The Movie, both debuted weakly with 5 million and 4.3 million, respectively. Andy Samberg proved unable to draw in the wily Judd Apatow audience. In limited release, El Cantante performed reasonably well with 3.2 million on 542 screens. Toto, there are still Jennifer Lopez fans out there. Miramax's Becoming Jane did great business in its first week on just 100 screens, pulling in a little over 1 million dollars. The Ten did only okay, averaging $4,700. It was fucking funny, though.

Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures