Oof! Once again, my sorry prognostication skills are naked before the world. Fortunately for me, it’s not like anyone really expects me to eat William Shatner’s toupee. I mean, it’s not like I could actually obtain the thing — he still needs it for “Boston Legal.” (I’m damn glad I didn’t suggest Tony Curtis’s apparently retired piece.)

So, quickly forgetting my ignoble defeat, let us move to the cold, hard numbers from the number crunchers of Box Office Mojo….

* “The Forbidden Kingdom” earned a healthy $20,870,000 at some 3,151 cinema dojos, more than doubling both Jet Li and Jackie Chan’s most recent vehicles, with the exception of the still powerful (for some reason) “Rush Hour” franchise. Considering the international appeal of the its stars and subject matter, this one seems on-track to make a healthy profit for its relatively modest rumored budget of $55 million. (Considering Chan and Li’s fame, one has to imagine they’re taking a lot of their compensation on “the back end.” $55 million would barely pay for the vegan lunch of two similarly powerful Hollywood heavyweights.)

*”Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was remembered by enough filmgoers to net $17, 348,000 on just under 2,800 screens. (And, no, it didn’t beat “Kingdom” on per screen averages either, earning $6,200 to the fight-fest’s $6,623.) Relative to it’s $30 million budget — which is low by current studio movie standards but still strikes me as somewhat inflated for a non star-driven, non-effects-laden comedy — it’s doing just fine, but nowhere near the bonanza of “Superbad,” which had about six months of buzz, an odd sort of star power from its three unknown leads, and the world’s most relatable premise for the prime moviegoing demographic of hormonally-challenged males and the hormonally-challenged of heart.

* “88 Minutes,” this weekend’s critically reviled, geriatricly pitched, Al Pacino starrer, did badly and failed to make it into third place. (That honor went to last weekend’s top film, the PG-13 slasher remake “Prom Night“). Still, it did better than you might think, netting some $6,800,000 from unsuspecting adults easily lulled by a familiar name and a premise that dates back to 1950. Whoo-ha.

* “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” was booked into 1,052 theaters — as far as I know, a post-“Fahrenheit 9/11” record for any documentary. Despite some controversy, the buzz on this doc — which only got two Tomatometer-adjudged “fresh” reviews, including a mild endorsement from Mark Moring of Christianity Today — was basically non-existent, though it was able get positive blurbs from Christian far-right heavyweights James Dobson and Pat Robertson, as well as lousy film critic turned annoying rightwing radio host Michael Medved. Presumably a mostly conservative evangelical audience was able to put $3,153,000 in the collection plate, and a not horrible per screen average of just under $3,000. Nevertheless, it looks like the Beast (aka Michael Moore) remains by far the king of the documentary box-office.

*This is especially true as the liberal heir apparent to the Beast’s throne of first-person filmmaking, Morgan Spurlock, failed to make much of a dent in arthouses with “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden” which had a pretty dismal opening weekend with a per-screen average of only $1,401 in 102 theaters and a grand total of $143,000. It did, however, manage to beat a truly low profile — so low it can’t be found on Rotten Tomatoes — but possibly not horrible horror flick called “Pathology” which did find it’s way into fifty theaters this week, but perhaps not for long. Mr. Disgusting likes the film, but smells a rat at MGM….