Beowulf slaughters the US box office

America has spoken, cinematically at least, and what the country wanted this weekend was a naked, muscled Ray Winstone battling a naked, golden Angelina Jolie. All right, so there’s more to the movie than those two, but they were all over the advertising. Despite the hype and its position at the top of the charts, Beowulf’s spoils of victory aren’t that huge – the movie took in just $28 million, which is not amazing for a film released on more than 3,000 screens.

Still, it put it ahead of last week’s bounce-back champ Bee Movie, which flew back down to second with $14.3 million, bringing its total to $93.8 million. And American Gangster at third slipped over the $100 million mark by one million dollars to start earning some profit in its third week.

Fred Claus got shoved down to fourth, with a weekend haul of $12 million and a current coffer total of $35 million. In terms of kids’ movies, that was still far better than this weekend’s second new arrival, Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, which showed little magic on its launch, making just $10 million.

In sixth, Dan In Real Life held up well, taking $4.5 million for a current total of $37 million, while the Coens’ latest, No Country For Old Men, surged into the charts thanks to an expansion of cinemas. It’s taken $4.9 million so far (impressive, considering that it’s on just 138 screens), where as Lions For Lambs at eighth, has made $11.5 million and is on 2,216 cinema screens.

So to the bottom of the charts, where Saw IV sits in a pool of blood and $61.8 million to date, while the final new release of the week, the widely-panned Love In The Time Of Cholera, limped into 10th with a disappointing $1.9 million.