The Help won a third weekend in a row, and some amazing stats to go along with it.

Theoretically you could say the fact The Help only lost 2.3% of its business from last weekend could be chalked up the fact less screens were open last weekend due to Hurricane Irene.  If those screens had been open, the film would have made more last weekend, meaning it’s take this weekend would be a bigger drop, but any way you slice it, it still brought in $14.2 million, bringing its domestic gross to $118.6 million off of a $25 million budget.

The new releases this week were subdued, and no match for the might of the three week title holder.  Coming in second was the thriller The Debt.  It scored a modest $9.67 million in its opening weekend.

Third and fourth place were separated by a mere $60,000.  Apollo 18 took third with $8.7 million while Shark Night 3D came in with $8.64 million.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes continued to beat its chest, coming in fifth this week with $7.8 million.  It hasn’t set box office records, but it has certainly done a healthy business bringing in a total of $160 million domestically.

Overall the summer film season is closing out with a whimper, with nothing but The Help catching on with audiences.  All of last week’s new releases - Colombiana, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Our Idiot Brother - all fell out of the top 5.  The title for the most embarrassing August release has to go to Conan the Barbarian which fell to 17th place this weekend with a paltry $1.3 million in its third weekend for a domestic total of $19.6 million.  It hasn’t even been able to beat the dollar total of the 1982 film of the same name which brought in $39 million.  Adjusted for inflation the new one is a complete train wreck.

The only major release for next weekend is Contagion, with a couple smaller films also taking their opening bows.

We haven’t seen or heard much about Apollo 18 since the first teaser trailer came out in Feb., but a new full trailer has just been released that gives us a bit more of a feeling for the film.

I must say that I don’t think I ever quite envisioned a horror film set on the Moon, but that looks to be exactly what we’re getting come this Sept.  Will the formula work?  I don’t know.  I can’t see plunking down my money in the theater for this, but I can definitely see watching it at home.

The film will hit theaters Sept. 2nd.

Apollo 18 tells the story of an unknown NASA mission to the Moon, and why we’ve never gone back in the years since.

It’s rare that a movie sneaks up on me without me hearing much about it.  I had head the name Apollo 18 here or there, but had never really gotten a handle on what it was about.  The trailer has now popped up, and while it follows the “found footage” format that was made popular by movies such as The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project, it adds the concept of an otherworldly locale and a question that has been on the minds of space enthusiasts for years about why we’ve never returned to our only natural satellite.

To be honest, I find holes with the whole concept for the outset that there could have never been an Apollo launch that people didn’t know about (launching a rocket tends to create a lot of very visible evidence), and it appears to get a little wacky later on with some sort of “space spider” antagonist, but yet I find myself intrigued enough to possibly want to watch it some day.

Here’s the Apollo 18 trailer in all its under-the-radar glory.