My spitball prediction for the weekend, had I given enough of a damn to make one last Wednesday or Thursday, never would have had Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon‘s The Informant! beating Karyn Kusama, Diablo Cody and Megan Fox‘s Jennifer’s Body. And yet the former will probably come in third (right behind Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All My Myself) with something close to $10 million (okay, perhaps closer to $9 million) and Jennifer’s Body will end up with slightly less than $7 million. The latter was cheaply produced, but that doesn’t make it any less dead as we speak.

The conventional wisdom explanation for the failure of Body is that it wasn’t ferociously horrific enough to compete with previous genre standouts, and that women didn’t relate to/didn’t want to see the cruelly competitive relationship between Fox’s Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried‘s Needy, or they just don’t like Fox. (Who actually likes her? Big difference between that and being fantasized about.) In any case Cody is much lower on the totem pole this morning than she was a few days ago, Kusama is now a two-time loser in the all-female mass-market genre flick game (this and Aeon Flux) and Fox, dinged last week by an unflattering characterization on Michael Bay‘s website, has demonstrated she can’t (a) act or (b) open movies.

Credit should also go to Warner Bros. marketing for creating an inspired Informant! campaign that suggested a brisk comedic attitude and which actually bore similarities to the film itself….unusual!