(EW.com) -- After two weekends atop the box office, "Puss in Boots" was thwarted by a pair of newcomers, "Immortals" and "Jack and Jill," both of which opened to solid numbers.





"J. Edgar" wasn't quite as fortunate, but overall, the box office exhibited life like it hasn't for the past few months, and the top ten ticked up 18 percent over the same weekend last year -- a good sign headed into Thanksgiving. Check out all the details below:





Relativity's "Immortals" became the new box office titan, fending off competition and scoring a strong $32 million opening. While that number pales in comparison to the openings of 300 ($70.8 million) and "Clash of the Titans" ($61.2 mil), it puts "Immortals" ahead of other swords-and-sandals debuts like "Prince of Persia" ($30.1 mil) and "Alexander" (13.7 mil). The Tarsem Singh-directed visual feast, which stars Henry Cavill and Freida Pinto, also revives the ancient epic genre's viability in 2011 after flop openings from "The Eagle" ($8.7 mil) and "Conan the Barbarian" ($10 mil).





For Relativity, a $32 million debut (66 percent of which came from 3-D screens) is a major win. The studio spent a surprisingly small $75 million on the film, and a rep told me on Friday that they were hoping for a $25-26 million start. Now, Relativity is hoping that broad appeal will continue to drive attendance.





The studio's exit polling reveals that "Immortals'" audience was 60/40 percent male/female and ethnically diverse as well -- 35 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Caucasian, 13 percent Asian, and 12 percent African-American.





According to Kyle Davies, Relativity's President of Worldwide Theatrical Distribution, "A lot of people are enjoying the picture, and when you look down the road going into the holidays, there's just nothing for the action fans, so I think that's good for us." But will the film actually continue to perform well into the Thanksgiving holiday?





That could be difficult.





"Immortals" looks like it may already be suffering from the fanboy effect, which occurs when eager sci-fi fans rush out to the theater en masse on opening night, thereby inflating numbers on the front end of a film's box office run. This can often lead precipitous drops in the days/weeks that follow. Just look at "Immortals'" weekend trajectory: the flick earned $15 million on Friday, followed by a 32 percent drop to $10.2 million on Saturday (while the rest of the Top 10 increased by an average of 8 percent), followed by a more-standard 33 percent decline to $6.8 million on Sunday.





Davies attributes the large Friday-to-Saturday drop to the fact that Veterans Day fell on a Friday. He claims that with kids out of school all day, Fridays numbers were boosted substantially. We'll have to wait and see how "Immortals," which earned an alright "B" CinemaScore grade, does in the weeks to come.





In second place (for now) was Adam Sandler's latest comedy, "Jack and Jill," which scored a $26 million debut out of 3,438 theaters -- good for a $7,563 per theater average. Sony's $80 million picture performed within expectations, but when compared to the rest of Sandler's bawdy mainstream comedy wheelhouse, this is one of his poorer results, and his worst live-action comedic opening (not including 2009â€²s death-themed dramedy "Funny People") since "Little Nicky"'s $16.1 million bow in 2000.





"Jack and Jill" received atrocious reviews, and while those have never stopped Sandler's films from succeeding in the past, there is a sense that the summation of so many truly awful critical reactions back-to-back-to-back -- when not balanced by winking affection for lovably dumb films like "Big Daddy" and "
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