'Underworld' claims top spot with 'Red Tails' swooping in for second

Featuring leather bodysuit-clad Kate Beckinsale, Underworld: Awakening easily grabbed first place over the weekend with a $25.4 million total. The fourth installment in the action-horror franchise opened just slightly off the third, all but insuring there will be more Underworld films to come. 3D and IMAX ticket sales definitely boosted the movie's bottom line, wtih 59% of sales from 3D and 15% from IMAX. The slightly male-dominated audience loved the picture, rating it an A- in CinemaScore exit polls.

In second place, Red Tails overperformed significantly with a $19.1 million total. The historical picture, which focuses on the aerial assaults carried out by black Tuskegee airmen during WWII, drew raves from its audiences. The movie averaged an A in exit polls, with the very young and very old giving it an A+. Executive producer George Lucas had to finance and distribute the movie himself (20th Century Fox contributed nothing to the distribution) so this movie's success is a big nose-thumb at the major studios, who apparently didn't trust that a movie with an all-black cast could do well.

Two spots down in fifth place, Haywire debuted to just $9 million. I thought the Steven Soderbergh-directed flick was awesome, without succumbing to all the pifalls I associate with action movies. Apparently I was in the minority. Audiences gave the movie an astoundingly awful D+ rating in exit polls. Wow. Well, the movie was about as far as you can get from star Gina Carano's previous stint on "American Gladiators," so I suspect the negative rating had something to do with people's expectations not jiving with what they actually saw.

Post-9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close went wide in its fifth week and earned $10.5 million. The drama has been pretty much shut out of awards season, and some people may not be excited to buy tickets in order to revisit 9/11. It's actually the worst opening in some time for stars Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, though the tale really centers on a young boy, not Hanks and Bullock.

The Descendants, the Golden Globe winner for Best Drama, went up 17% to $2.4 million even as it shed 100 locations. It sounds like this George Clooney starrer is aiming for an Oscars push instead. The Artist, which won in the Best Comedy category, went from 216 to 662 locations, but it didn't soar as much as it should have. The silent picture averaged $3,500 per screen for a total of $2.3 million, finishing behind The Descendants. I wouldn't be surprised if the black-and-white movie has difficulty catching on beyond arthouse audiences.

Coriolanus, which is directed by and stars Ralph Fiennes, earned $60,000 from nine screens. The $6,700 per-screen average, however, is far behind the debut needed to launch an indie success.

This Friday, action drama The Grey will open along with the self-explanatory Man on a Ledge and Katherine Heigl detective comedy One for the Money.