“The Final Destination” beat “Halloween II” by a considerable margin over the weekend, with New Line’s fourth kick at the deathtrap franchise grossing $28.3 million to the $17.4 million taken in by Rob Zombie’s slasher sequel. Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” dropped to second place with $20 million.

Curiously, after headlining the worldwide “Basterds” gross last week, Variety goes back to using domestic numbers for this weekend’s report. Which is weird, really, because “The Final Destination” also opened internationally, pulling in another $10.1 million from foreign screens. Variety doesn’t mention that number until about a third of the way down the page.

You know how I was half-kidding about the Weinsteins using their pernicious influence to get Variety to run with the larger number, just so they could wave the page around and impress people with the great big opening weekend they needed so badly? Now I’m just weirded out.