'Scorpion King' Stings the Competition

April 22 -- The supernaturally good box-office luck of the Mummy franchise continued, as The Scorpion King — a spinoff starring WWF grappler The Rock as an ancient-times warrior who appeared for approximately 2.5 seconds in The Mummy Returns — easily won the weekend box office crown.

Scorpion King's $36.2 million opening easily beat the record for the best-ever April debut established by The Matrix back in 1999, but no one expects King to have anything resembling the legs of the now-seminal Keanu Reeves film.

Only one other new release landed in the top 10: the Sandra Bullock mystery Murder By Numbers, which racked up an unimpressive $9.5 million in second place. Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson's Changing Lanes had a decent enough second week, and the rest of the recent hits saw their revenue decline in a fairly predictable manner.

In its fourth week, The Rookie jumped up from fifth to fourth place, cementing its status as a legitimate word-of-mouth hit in the process. Far less fortunate were The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes. Both dropped precipitously.

The Scorpion King has a decent shot at returning in the top spot next weekend, when the studios clean out their closets and release a number of films that have been collecting dust on the shelf — including the Val Kilmer drug drama The Salton Sea and the latest Friday the 13th sequel, Jason X — before the summer season kicks off in earnest with the May 3 debut of Columbia's eagerly-anticipated Spider-Man.

Andrew Johnston is a film critic and associate editor at US WEEKLY magazine.