Say hello to Jason Bourne - spy, killer, amnesiac and box office titan. Yes, Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass' latest, The Bourne Ultimatum, has gone straight to number one at the US box office, and set a new August record on the way with a $70.2million opening weekend.
That beats the previous record-holder for August, Rush Hour 2, which opened to $67.4m in 2001 (although adjusted for inflation the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker film would still be number one), and is streets ahead of The Bourne Supremacy, which opened in 2004, in July, with $52.5m. We like to think that it's proof that audiences were wowed by Supremacy and wanted more Greengrassy-Damony goodness this time around. With a per-screen average of over $19,000, excellent exit polling and glowing reviews, expect Bourne to keep doing well into the week.
Elsewhere, The Simpsons Movie took $25.6m to land in second place, a whopping 65% drop on last week (even by the standards of the blockbustery-summer season), but given that it's already taken $236m worldwide and cost only $75-odd million to make (although marketing costs would have been significantly more than that) Fox are still laughing all the way to the bank.
That leaves so-crazy-it's-surely-genius dog superhero movie Underdog taking $12m and third place, followed closely by I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Hairspray and **Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix **all with around $9 - 10m takes this weekend. No Reservations and Transformers are also hanging in there in seventh and eighth places, before we see another couple of new releases rounding out the top ten. Yes, Hot Rod took just $5 million, suggesting that Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg isn't quite the star the filmmakers hoped just yet. And it's followed by Bratz: The Movie, the film adaptation of the bobble-headed airhead dolls, with $4.3m, showing that you can believe in yourself all you want, but it doesn't always bring in the big bucks if you neglect to be any good.
The only news further down the chart was the limited opening of Becoming Jane, taking just over $1million on only 100 screens for the second highest per-screen average in the chart (behind Bourne), and the fact that Live Free or Die Hard finally dropped out of the top ten.