In what was generally a down weekend at the Kiwi box office, Twilight New Moon managed to hold off all comers in its fourth week to stay king of the charts.

Falling a moderate amount and squeaking above the second week of Where The Wild Things Are, New Moon stood firm in first place for what will definitely be its last weekend, with Avatar certain to dominate the next month.

With over $5 Million now collected from the box office, New Moon will start shedding theatres and look forward to an enormous DVD and Blu Ray release in March 2010.

Displaying great legs in second place the Spike Jonze “family” adventure flick Where The Wild Things Are took in just over $200,000 to crack the $600,000 mark in total receipts. With strong word of mouth and great critical reaction, look for the book adaptation to end up with around 4-5 times its opening weekend, a stunning return for Roadshow.

The Time Travelers Wife again took advantage of a dearth of like-minded titles in the marketplace to actually move up a position into third place this weekend. Falling moderately the film is a smidgen under $500,000 and is already proving somewhat of a surprise in what is normally a tough sell genre (The sci-fi romance). Trading places with The Time Travellers Wife, Zombieland is slowly seeing its audience disappear as the weeks go by, but the flick will have great success on DVD where this kind of film usually performs much better.

The first of the week’s new releases was also its most disappointing. Getting crushed in a poor 5^th place, the Jonathon King (Black Sheep) adaptation of the beloved Maurice Gee classic Under The Mountain got ignored by cinema goers and could only generate $93,000 in 46 theatres. A weak marketing campaign combined with ineffectual targeting meant that audiences were confused by what to expect from the film, leading to an overall apathy from almost every sector of the public. Next weekend will be crucial to Mountains long term prospects as many cinema owners will chuck the film to open up more cinemas for Avatar.

Disaster movie 2012 slid down into sixth place, gobbling up another $93,000. The second new release, Planet 51, squeaked into 7^th but will be hoping for more cash into the tills as the Christmas viewer period commences. Another similar animated film followed in 8^th place with Sony’s Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.

The Hilary Swank biopic Amelia opened to moderate results in ninth place, a good result given the general public’s unfamiliarity with the aviator. Rounding out the top ten, despite playing in only seven cinemas, was the martial arts blockbuster, The Storm Warriors. Pulling in $40,000 and the best per-screen average in the country, The Storm Warriors followed up The Founding Of A Republic’s big opening earlier this year and again proved the Kiwi fascination with day-and-date Chinese flicks. To put this into perspective if The Storm Warriors had opened in the same amount of cinemas as Under The Mountain with the same average, we would have had a new number one!

Overall the box office collected around $1.3 Million which is well down on last year’s respective weekend although some of the decline must be attributed to the enormous crowd for Auckland’s Christmas in the Park.

Next weekend all the other studios flee from Fox’s behemoth Avatar as James Cameron will easily open his blockbuster at number one. Opening in both conventional and 3-D cinemas, the only thing holding back the sci-fi epic from besting Twilight: New Moon’s recent opening record could be the length of the film; but the anticipation for the director’s Titanic follow-up is unprecedented and it will dominate the kiwi box office next weekend.