District 9 won over the US box office this weekend, despite banning non-humans from screenings. The alien thriller from Neil Blomkamp took a very respectable $37m and the top spot in the US, putting it on a par with Starship Troopers in the box office stakes and only a bit behind Cloverfield.
In second place was last week's winner,G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, sliding a steep 58.9% for $22.5m this weekend for a total of just under $100m so far. That's followed by The Time-Traveler's Wife, taking a respectable $19.2m, chiefly from women who have read the bestselling book on which it's based.
The other new releases performed less well. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, starring Jeremy Piven, took only $5.4m - on a par with the underperforming Hot Rod a couple of years back - and tragically Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful Ponyo took only $3.5m, which we think gives us grounds to doubt the sanity of many American cinemagoers. In contrast, guinea-pig action movie G-Force, now in its fourth week, did almost twice as well with $6.9m. That's now within a guinea-pig whisker of $100m.
Elsewhere, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince edged closer to the $300m mark, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen inched another step towards $400m (expect the distributors to keep that hanging around in cinemas until it passes the milestone).