Brutal box office

YOUR WEAKEND BOX OFFICE…NEVER MIND: Like the music biz, the film industry is having a rocky summer. The difference between the two is that summertime is traditionally the busiest time of the year for movies. This weekend the box office bottomed out, registering the lowest ticket sales in 11 years. In its second week, The Possession wound up at #1 on just $9.5 million, while the top debut, The Words, a love story starring Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, managed just a paltry $5 million. We’ll spare you the ugly details, but overall, ticket sales amounted to only $67 million— down 18% from the same weekend last year, and the lowest sum since the second weekend after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the take was $59.4 million. "Nobody picks the first weekend of September because they think it's going to be a huge gross," Steven Friedlander of CBS Films, which released The Words, told the L.A. Times. "You open films that you want to sit there and find an audience. Historically, it's a weekend where people are getting their life back into order after the summer, and movies aren't part of it. You're doing back-to-school shopping, getting the kids into the dorms, and soccer moms are back on the road." (9/10a)