Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland easily handled competition from some potent new releases and won the weekend box office derby with an estimated $34.5 million, a drop of just 45% in its third weekend.  Alice has now earned more than $265 million domestically and should end up north of $350 million, which will present the rest of the 2010 films with a pretty high bar to overcome if they want to displace Alice as the #1 movie of the year.  Alice’s average of $9,227 per theater was tops in the top 10.  Alice is the first Disney film since Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest in 2006 to hold the box office crown for three weeks in a row.

In second place, at least for now, is Fox’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which took in an estimated $21.8 million.  Based on Jeff Kinney’s series of quasi-graphic novels, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie was made for $15 million, which means that Fox has a very profitable franchise on its hands.  As might be expected the film attracted a young audience (59% was under 25) that was almost equally divided between males (49%) and females (51%).

Close behind Wimpy Kid was The Bounty Hunter, which stars Jennifer Anniston and Gerard Butler.  In spite of terrible reviews (only 9% positive on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes) the star-powered battle-of-the-sexes comedy earned an estimated $20 million.  As is typical with romantic comedies the audience skewed female (58%) and older (50% over 30).

Universal’s science fiction/slasher movie Repo Men bombed in its debut earning just $6.2 million from 2,541 theaters for a very poor $2,440 average.  The same studio's Iraq War action film The Green Zone didn't fare much better, dropping 58.3 % in its second weekend.  The Paul Greengrass-directed film has now earned just $24 million against its $100 million cost.

The comedy She’s Out of My League (down just 38.5%), the Martin Scorsese-directed Shutter Island (off 41.6%), and James Cameron’s Avatar (off 38.7% in its 14th weekend) all fared quite well.  Kevin Smith’s Cop Out dropped out of the top ten for the first time.  The $30 million film looks to end up earning under $45 million at the domestic box office.

Overall the total gross for the top ten films was up 19% from the same frame last year when Knowing opened and up 18% from 2008 when Horton Hears a Who enjoyed its second weekend at the top.