This is why I don’t make a living as a box-office predictor: I would not have thought “The Karate Kid” would stomp all over “The A-Team” in their opening weekend, with the family drama pulling in $56 million to the action update’s $26 million. Maybe there’s something to the whole graceful art of leg-sweeping after all.

Honestly, though? I was under the impression that “The A-Team” was a fairly heavily anticipated picture, while “The Karate Kid” was the less desired remake of the two. But I’m not entirely sure where I got that impression, unless it was that one issue of Entertainment Weekly. Obviously, neither of us is as tight with the zeitgeist as we used to be.

It’s also worth pointing out that both movies pulled in more than last week’s top release — when “Shrek Forever After” topped the charts last weekend, it rolled over all the new openers with just $25.3 million, and the weekend was deemed a scary predictor of a bad summer. Hollywood will be jumping for joy with this week’s bigger, burlier numbers … though now I’m worried they’ll rush to put Jaden Smith into everything currently in development.

Hey, maybe it’s not too late for M. Night Shyamalan to digitally insert him into “The Last Airbender”. At the very least, it’d address some of those nagging diversity issues …