Roland Emmerich, aka the Master of Disaster, has easily taken the number one slot in both the US and worldwide box office charts this weekend, with his latest disaster movie 2012 raking in $65m at the US box office and an estimated $225m worldwide - the fifth best opening worldwide ever, and the highest for a non-sequel.
Emmerich, who we like to think directs every scene by simply saying "Make it bigger, then blow it up", may be disappointed that the film did slightly less well than The Day After Tomorrow, but mostly he'll probably be relieved that he looks set to easily outstrip 10,000BC, his 2008 film where the world didn't end and audiences mostly stayed home.
Another big winner on this week's chart was Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, which expanded to a still-tiny 174 screens and took a whopping $6.1m and fourth place. Just to put that in perspective, every other film in the top ten was showing in at least 2,000 cinemas.
Couple's Retreat and Paranormal Activity both passed the $100m mark during the week, although the latter is now falling away rather faster than the former, and there were steep drops for This Is It and The Fourth Kin****d. Last week's number one, A Christmas Carol, however, did better, falling only 26% to $22.3m. That's still more than The Polar Express did, but does indicate that people are still getting their heads into Christmas mode.
The other new wide-ish release was what the Yanks are calling Pirate Radio, which we know as The Boat That Rocked. Out on 882 screens, it made a less than stellar $2.9m, proving that less can be more when it comes to the number of characters.
Elsewhere, Fantastic Mr Fox opened on just four screens and took $260,000, by far the best per-screen average on the list, if still not a patch on Precious's opening weekend average of over $100,000 per screen last weekend.