The King of Pop stayed at the top of the New Zealand box office this weekend, dominating the competition completely.

Staying at number one for what should be its last weekend, This Is It showed great legs dropping only 27% and moonwalking another $770,000 to raise the Michael Jackson documentary to well north of $2.4 Million. With so much in its coffers after only 10 days, the farewell to the king looks to end up as one of 2009’s highest grossing pictures and also smash the Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls all-time record as the highest grossing documentary in New Zealand history.

 

Coming in second to the gloved one was the Cameron Diaz tearjerker My Sister’s Keeper which beat off its more fancied competition to score almost $300,000 in a moderate amount of cinemas. Playing to a much more dramatic and older audience than a lot of the top ten, the drama was able to generate the second-best screen average (after This Is It) and should look forward to a very profitable run.

 

Sliding down into third was Julie and Julia which flambéed its way over a million dollars. Jim Carrey’s A Christmas Carol opened wide to a very disappointing result in fourth place. Averaging a measly $1700 per theatre the Robert Zemeckis animated retelling of the Dickens classic found almost now traction this far out from Christmas. Disney would have expected a much bigger opening than the $122,000 that Carol did open with and would have hoped to still have had the title in cinemas over the Christmas break for two bites at the cake, but with such a horrid opening, many theatres will be pulling the picture for 2012 or Twilight: New Moon sooner rather than later.

 

Opening in fifth with a more respectable opening was the final film of Heath Ledger The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Doubling the average of the Carrey starrer the Terry Gilliam directed film was able to draw a large demographic of fans with numerous angles of interest in the flick. From the Monty Python director to the star wattage of the Ledger replacements (Depp, Law and Farrell), Dr Parnassus also supplied the box office with a little bit of mystery which will sell just about anything.

 

Bruce Willis action title Surrogates slipped into sixth position collecting another $88,000 to add to its underwhelming total. The Disney release will have to rely on a big DVD launch to have any chance of breaking even. Opening in a surprisingly strong seventh place was Rialto’s latest opera release, this time opening Tosca, after last week’s All’s Well That End’s Well, to a very respectable $33,000.

 

An Education continued to teach the box office a lesson in aging gracefully as it dropped into eighth position after five semesters on the charts. The Final Destination tumbled five spots to land in ninth place for the weekend, with a final box office total of around $750,000 looking more and more likely. Rounding out the kiwi top ten this weekend was Couples Retreat as it collected another $26,000 to sit agonizingly close to a million dollars.

 

Next week should see Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster opus 2012 dominate the box office but the real must-see movie comes in the form of the year’s best horror film, the Spanish sequel [REC] 2. The “zombie” follow-up to one of the best and scariest horror movies of the last decade might even crack the top ten despite only playing in limited theatres.