Despite a nearly 40% drop in ticket sales, Shrek Forever After maintained its number one spot from last week — surely with a substantial helping hand from 3-D venues — fighting off an unusual pairing of two simultaneously released Middle Eastern desert set films.

Prince of Persia‘s meager $30mil opening weekend proves that we still haven’t hit the mark on the video-game-to-film adaptation and Prince is definitely in for the long haul to make up its steep $200mil budget. Narrowly beating out its opening competitor, Sex and the City 2 pulled in $2mil more on 200 less screens than Prince of Persia. Reaching just under half its budget, Sex and the City 2 is fiscally pretty comfortable, but assuming the only true fans of the series rushed out for their fill of sequin covered vapid fashionista nonsense, we should see a significant drop next weekend with Prince of Persia taking the lead.

Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood dropped 40% and 45% respectively making way for the the 2 weekend openers to have an easy take-over.

All in all it was disappointing and uneventful weekend for cinema, and honestly a world where Sex and the City 2 is number 2 in the box office is hardly a world to live in at all. Festival favorite Splice will make a great debut next weekend for horror fans, and hopefully Get Him to the Greek will make us laugh enough we can let Carrie Bradshaw finally fade away into the annals of housewife pandering gay community exploiting television and go the way of her evil second head signature mole — Here one day; Gone the next.

Check out the Top 10 estimates below:

1. Shrek Forever After – $43.3mil; $133mil
2. Sex and the City 2 – $32.1mil (debut)
3. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – $30.1mil (debut)
4. Iron Man 2 – $16mil; $274.6mil
5. Robin Hood – $10.3mil; $83mil
6. Letters to Juliet – $5.9mil; $36.6mil
7. Just Wright – $2.2mil; $18.1mil
8. Date Night – $1.75mil; $93.3mil
9. MacGruber – $1.4mil; $7.1mil
10. How to Train Your Dragon – $1.02mil; $212.6mil

Final box office numbers come out Monday.

What did you watch this weekend?

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