Jack-in-the-Box Office for the weekend of February 19-21

Martin Scorsese may not be winning another Oscar next month, yet he still has plenty of reason to celebrate. His psychological thriller "Shutter Island" grossed $40 million this weekend, the highest-grossing opening weekend of any Scorsese film thus far. "Shutter Island" is currently Scorsese's eight-highest grossing film to date and the eight-highest grossing film of 2010 . It's clearly set to move up the ranks, likely becoming number one on both counts in the coming weeks. The film also grossed half of its $80 million dollar budget (worldwide figures are not available at this time), so the film could easily make a handsome profit by the end of its worldwide theatrical run.

With many movie-goers spending the weekend on "Shutter Island" (the only film opening in wide release this weekend), holdover films showed steep declines. "Valentine's Day" fell almost 70% from last week, landing in second place by taking in only $17 million. Yet that's likely only icing on the cake for Warner Brother's who's $52 million investment has now yielded a gross of over $122 million worldwide. "Avatar" was in third place for it's tenth weekend. making another $16 million dollars, bringing its totals to over $687 domestically and $2.4 billion worldwide.

Rounding out the top five is "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lighting Thief," which despite a 51% decline in its domestic gross in its second week, has now made over $126 million worldwide from Fox's $95 million dollar investment. Like "Valentine's Day," Universal's "The Wolfman" also showed a decline of almost 70% in it's second week. The film has now grossed over $50 million domestically and $97 million worldwide, yet will likely have to wait another week or two to eclipse its $150 dollar budget.

Winning the per-theater-average race this weekend was Roman Polanski's thriller "The Ghost Writer". The film made over $44,000 per theater in four theaters, bringing its weekend total to $179,000.

What did you go see this weekend? A new film from one of two Oscar-winning directors? Or did you catch up with this year's nominees? Or did you see one of last week's genre films in their second week? Please let us know what you saw, and if we should make sure to see it too. From all of us at Awards Circuit, we hope you had a wonderful weekend at the movies and we hope to see you there soon.