Top 10 at the Weekend Box Office

Notes:

• In a surprise for industry analysts, Warner Bros.' Ben Affleck-helmed heist thriller The Town earned $23.8 million for a #1 bow. Good reviews for Affleck's second directorial feature helped to push the film to the top.
• Affleck marked a new helming high by topping his $5.5 million debut with 2007's Gone Baby Gone. But the bow by The Town -- the first pic Affleck both directed and starred -- was never going to approach his personal best as an actor, a $59.1 million opening with 2001's Pearl Harbor.
  
• Sony's youth comedy Easy A -- which had been expected to easily top the weekend rankings -- settled for $18.2 million in second place on support from teen and tween females.
• In other new releases, Universal's horror pic Devil rang up $12.6 million in third place -- the low end of projections. Lionsgate's 3D animated family comedy Alpha and Omega collected $9.2 million in fifth place.
• Last weekend's chart-topper -- Screen Gems' Resident Evil: Afterlife -- fell a whopping 62% in its sophomore session to $10.1 million in fourth place, with $44 million in cumulative box office.
• Summit Entertainment staged a limited re-release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse in a bid to eclipse $300 million domestically. It did just that, as $205,000 in weekend grosses yielded a new cumulative total of $300.1 million.
  
• The weekend's top 10 movies earned $85 million, or 3% more than top performers in a comparable session last year.
• All figures are industry estimates. Final weekend figures will be released on Monday.
• Reviews of The Town, Inception, The Other Guys and other movies not in the top 10 can be found by clicking on the Film Reviews archive icon at left.
• Sources: Hollywood.com, Hollywood Reporter