"Bangkok Dangerous" starring Nicolas Cage managed to be the best of the worst this weekend. The film directed by Honk Kong Pang brothers “ruled” the North American box office on Sunday with the embarrassing weekend earnings of just $7.8 million, distributor Lionsgate said.

The weekend after Labor Day is usually not a good one for the movie industry, as schools open their doors to their students, leaving the theaters almost empty. Pro football season is also not helping Hollywood on this particular time of the year, but still, ticket sales haven’t been that low since September 21-23, 2001.

Except that was a time when movies were the last thing on most of Americans’ minds. This weekend the top 10 films only scored $47.6 million in ticket sales.

Although critics were not very fond of Cage’s latest role and the whole let’s-remake-our-own-movie thing, the industry was expecting the number of curious folks or fans of the genre to be considerable larger and were predicting about $10 million in tickets. All in all, “Dangerous in Bangkok” did reach number one and managed to knock the Hollywood spoof Tropic Thunder from the top spot after three weeks at No. 1.

Other that made the top this weak week are “ The House Bunny” with $5.9 million on the third spot, while” The Dark Knight” remained in the top 5 two months after its release, taking fourth place with $5.7 million, which seems low now, low for the people in the business, that is.

Except for the fact that, unlike Cage’s new film, the Batman sequel reached the top with $158,411,483 in the first weekend, which only proves that people would much rather see a good guy in action than a bad guy going soft.