because of weaker competition.

That got me thinking about dumping grounds — the conventional wisdom that early in the year and after the summer movie season, Hollywood drops its unwanted product on the market just to be rid of it. I decided to try to quantify the dumping ground.

In this campaign season, what can we learn from the performances of An American Carol and Religulous?

The easy conclusion is that audiences aren't real keen on such aggressively political material, with the two movies finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the weekend's overall box office. The second easy conclusion is that conservatives are slightly hungrier for entertainment than people who don't like religion.

Neither is necessarily correct.

Late afternoon Tuesday, the Christian drama Fireproof had unofficially won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, with a gross of almost $7 million and a per-theater average to make Eagle Eye sweat. By Wednesday morning, however, it was in fourth place.

If you glance at the box-office top 10 this week, you might think that the supernatural romantic comedy Ghost Town was a bomb, finishing last among the four major new releases and eighth overall. But the movie's title was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Paramount/DreamWorks only exhibited it in 1,505 theatres - a sure sign the studio doesn't believe in the movie. (Its opening-weekend competitors - Lakeview Terrace, Igor, and My Best Friend's Girl - were all released in more than 2,300 theatres.)

Much has been written over the past 18 months about the death/irrelevance of film criticism in print media, as newspapers scaled back their movie coverage and Premiere stopped publishing a print edition.