'The Hobbit' Holds Off 'Jack Reacher,' 'This is 40' at Box Office

This was … unexpected.

Despite dropping an estimated 56% in its second weekend in theaters, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey maintained its hold on the box-office top slot, besting at least five newcomers.

The Hobbit earned an estimated $36.7M from screenings in various formats, more than twice the amount earned by Jack Reacher ($15.6M), the movie that landed in second place.

This ranks as a relative slow start for a Tom Cruise thriller – particularly one that’s adapted from a powerful series of crime novels. Case in point: Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible opened to $12.7M back in 2011, but that was only in 425 theaters. However, earlier this year, Cruise’s Rock of Ages also got off to a slow start with a $14.4M opening in 3,470 locations.

Reacher finished just ahead of the latest Judd Apatow comedy, This is 40, which rolled into theaters with a $12M opening. Sadly, for Apatow, that’s almost half of the $22M earned by his Funny People back in 2009. And billing it as the “sort of” sequel to Knocked Up didn’t help post Knocked Up opening numbers. That comedy grabbed $30.6M in its debut weekend in 2007.

Apatow’s Knocked Up partner, Seth Rogen, saw his The Guilt Trip cruise to a sixth-place opening with an estimated $5.3M. And the Pixar re-release of Monsters Inc. added an additional $5M to its vaults, setting up a nice tease for Monsters University, next year’s sequel/prequel.

Here’s the full Top 10 list for the weekend:

MOVIE / WEEKEND / TOTAL