''Mission'' earned another $24 million over Mother's Day weekend

Happy Mother’s Day to all the gals out there — hopefully there are more of you who read this column than who’ve seen Mission: Impossible 3, or else I’m just wishing Happy Mother’s Day to a bunch of dudes here. And that would be awkward.

Anyway, I know a few people who are running to their mommies today, and it’s not just to give them a bouquet of black-eyed susans. It was a real bummer of a weekend at the box office. Overall receipts of $96 million — according to Sunday’s estimates — were down from a year ago, and my good buddy John at box office tracking firm Nielsen EDI notes that the last time a weekend’s total take was under $100 mil was early last December. Bummer! The only sorta good news was for M:I-3, which by virtue of playing against weak competition held onto the No. 1 spot even after its disappointing bow last weekend. Paramount’s action flick dropped 49 percent to come in with $24.5 mil and bring its 10-day total to $84.6 mil. Interestingly, that’s not far off from the $27 mil that M:I-2 made during its second weekend back in 2000, so there’s a glimmer of hope for Tom Cruise to bring in a few more bucks — at least until The Da Vinci Code and Over the Hedge open next week and we all forget about the Great Shrink Hater.

The rogue wave that swamps the ship surprises the characters in Poseidon (No. 2), but the movie’s super-soft opening was a disaster that everybody saw coming. The Warner Bros. movie, budgeted around $175 million, had been tracking badly and took in just $20.3 mil. There’s really nothing good to report about that number. It’s almost exactly the same as the $20.2 mil that Will Ferrell’s silly soccer comedy Kicking and Screaming opened to exactly one year ago — and you’ll remember that even that total (for a movie that cost at least $100 mil less than Poseidon) was a disappointment. I guess it’s nice that Poseidon sailed past the $20 mil mark. Of course, this is all based on early estimates, so the final numbers may well reveal it didn’t even do that.

RV held strong at No. 3 with $9.5 mil, dropping a mere 14 percent in its third weekend. The Robin Williams comedy has now brought in $42.8 mil overall. Lindsay Lohan’s latest comedy Just My Luck (No. 4) bowed with a very-weak $5.5 mil. Amazingly enough, Lohan has only ever starred in six movies, and Just My Luck‘s debut ranks a distant sixth among them, trailing the feeble $9.4 mil that met Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen in 2004. An American Haunting rounded out the top five with $3.7 mil. Even though audiences gave it a solid A CinemaScore rating, the new feel-good soccer movie Goal! The Dream Begins (No. 12) scored a mere $2 mil on 1,007 screens. That’s like losing to Canada in the first round of the World Cup by a score of 8-nil. And there wasn’t even positive word out of small-release-movie land: Keeping up With the Steins ($621,000 in 138 venues), Wah-Wah ($56,750 in 25 venues), Russian Dolls ($17,741 in three venues), and Sketches of Frank Gehry ($17,426 in two venues) all failed to make a mark, and this will be the last time you hear about any of them.

But enough of all that. Go call your mom and tell her you love her. I know I love mine. And you should love my mom, too: Because without my mom, this column wouldn’t exist.