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There's a lot that doesn't feel right about this premise, and it's not just the bizarre cross-promotion through XBox Live (is it pro or con on its premise?). If the people in the firefight are being controlled by outside players, how could anyone's skill as a soldier possibly enter into the picture? I think the filmmakers are a little confused about the concept of video games.

Ads for the film aren't helping, as it looks like an incoherent mess (considering it's from the directors of Crank, that could be a stylistic choice) of explosions, and Hall is rather difficult to buy as the billionaire badass (yes, even still after Dexter. He's a schemer and survivor, not a supervillain). The widest opening of this week at around 2,500 theaters, it should see only a modest $8 million.

Lastly, we have Extract, directed by Mike Judge of Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill and Office Space fame. Judge returns to the workplace for this film, though in a rather more dark and sardonic way than in Office Space. Jason Bateman plays the owner of a vanilla extract factory, unhappy in both his work and family life. An employee who suffered some damage to a ...sensitive part of his anatomy wants to sue him, and he believes his wife (Kristen Wiig) isn't as faithful as she could be

Enter Mila Kunis, playing an attractive employee at the factory, who Bateman believes is the path to his happiness, the trail of which goes through her pants. He decides to hire a gigolo for his wife without her knowledge, trying to trick her into cheating first. What a tangled web we weave...

This seems like a far more conventional comedy than we're used to from Judge, who went for the cult audiences with Office Space and Idiocracy. That's not to say this couldn't achieve that status in time, but the feel is a bit more sitcommy here rather than containing the big themes of either of those two. That, of course, is speaking to people who are already Judge fans, who are determined in spirit but small in number. For the rest of the movie going public, it's just an odd looking, mean-spirited comedy. Look for around $5 million for this film this weekend.

The Final Destination won the battle of the horror flicks last weekend, grabbing $27 million to start, and almost double its opening weekend from the last film in the series. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to put this at the feet of the 3-D technology used for the film, and is the most stark evidence yet of the current power of this new exhibition technique. Now that it's opened big, though, it's time for the even bigger fall. The novelty doesn't change the fact that horror films are notoriously front-loaded, and may in fact even exacerbate that fact. Look for a second weekend four-day total of $13 million.

The film it defeated, Halloween II, could be in even rougher shape. Its opening to $17 million, after the "original" started with $30 million in 2007, shows that enthusiasm for this film was way down from what people might have thought. I'd say we're looking at about $8 million here for its second frame.

Inglourious Basterds fared just okay in its holdover, adding another $19 million to its coffers, and moving past $75 million midweek. Tarantino's revisionist war epic seems due for a slight bounce back in drop-off, and should see a weekend of about $13 million over four days.

Forecast: Weekend of September 4-7, 2009
Rank	Film	Number of Sites	Changes in Sites from Last	Estimated Gross ($)
1	All About Steve	2,251	New	15.3
2	The Final Destination	3,121	0	13.1
3	Inglourious Basterds	3,358	+193	12.8
4	Gamer	2,502	New	8.4
5	Halloween II	3,088	+63	8.3
6	District 9	3,139	-41	7.0
7	Julie & Julia	2,528	+25	5.1
8	Extract	1,611	New	4.9
9	G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra	2,846	-621	4.0
10	The Time Traveler's Wife	2,803	-158	3.5

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