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FRIDAY 10:30 PM UPDATE: Here are the Top 10 movies at the North American box office tonight. Analysis coming: 1) Real Steel (DreamWorks/Disney) NEW [3,440 Theaters] Friday $8.7M, Estimated Weekend $27M; 2) The Ides Of March (Smokehouse/Sony) NEW [2,199 Theaters] Friday $3.7M, Estimated Weekend $11M; 3) Dolphin Tale (Alcon/Warner Bros) Week 3 [3,478 Theaters] Friday $2.4M, Estimated Weekend $8.5M, Estimated Cume $48.4M

Alcon Entertainment and Warner Bros.' inspirational Dolphin Tale took the No. 1 spot in its second weekend with $14.2 million, wresting the box office crown from fellow family pic The Lion King. Dolphin Tale fell only 27 percent--proving again the clout of an A+ CinemaScore—and ended the weekend with a domestic cume of $37.5 million. The movie's staying power is a victory for Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove's Alcon, the same production company behind The Blind Side, another film that played to both general moviegoers and faith-based audiences.

FRIDAY 1 PM: These are very early numbers based on matinees. Therefore the order could change dramatically by tonight. My sources say that according to noon averages, this is simply a snapshot of where the North American box office is right now:
1. The #1 film at this time is Sony’s Courageous which is running 55% ahead of where Fireproof was at this time of day. (Fireproof went on to gross $6.8m for its first weekend.

Jaws dropped in Hollywood on Sunday: For the second weekend in a row, a 17-year-old movie, “The Lion King,” was No. 1 at the North American box office. That animated film, re-released by Walt Disney Studios in 3-D, took in an estimated $22 million for a two-week total of $61.7 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles ticketing statistics.

Sony’s Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball topped the Friday box office with an estimated $6.8 million, putting it on course to score the best opening ever for a baseball drama with a projected weekend take of $20 million and solidifying the film’s awards standing. Taylor Lautner's Abduction, meanwhile, landed at No. 4. Moneyball's Friday standing doesn't mean it will necessarily come in at No. 1 -- the weekend is proving to be one of the difficult to call in months.

It's 1994 all over again, with a re-release of "The Lion King" opening at the top of the box office. A 3-D version of the wildly popular Disney animated musical earned a surprising $29.3 million in its first weekend in theaters, according to Sunday estimates. The original film made more than $40 million when it opened nationwide 17 years ago.

Defying all projections, Disney’s re-release of The Lion King roared its way to a first-day gross of $8.8 million at the domestic box office and is now on course to gross as much as $25 million for the weekend. Lion King easily claimed the top spot over three new films — Ryan Gosling starrer Drive, Sarah Jessica Parker comedy I Don’t Know How She Does It and Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs remake.

This weekend, grossing as much as the rest of the top five combined, the virus thriller Contagion opened at number one topping a sluggish frame that saw ticket sales slump to a new low for the year. The Warner Bros. drama scored an estimated $23.1M bow from 3,222 theaters (including 257 higher-priced IMAX screens) for a sturdy $7,180 average playing to a mature adult crowd.

In what’s shaping up to be possibly the slowest weekend of the year at the box office, the only bright spot was the new viral thriller Contagion, which topped the charts with an estimated $8 million on Friday. Warner Bros.’ PG-13 film, which was directed by Steven Soderbergh and stars a who’s who of Oscar winners and nominees, received mostly positive reviews and is on pace for a solid $22 million opening. But its success cannot distract from the box office’s overall dismal performance. The top 10 movies grossed an estimated $19.6 million on Friday — the lowest Friday figure so far this year.

"The Help" has stayed on the job over Labor Day, finishing as the No. 1 film for the third-straight weekend. The acclaimed drama about Southern black maids speaking out during the civil-rights movement took in $19 million over the long holiday weekend, according to studio estimates Monday.