The Taco Bell dog is out of alcohol rehab and ready to rule the box office! With his drug treatment center days behind him, this Taco Bell dog family pet comedy Beverly Hills Chihuahua ruled the top of the box office this weekend with an estimated $29 million take and a healthy $9,020 per screen average, blowing away the competition.

The Steven Spielberg-produced Eagle Eye held strong in week two, drawing in $17.7 million to bring its 10-day total to $54.6 million, good enough for the second spot on the chart. In third place was Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the Michael Cera-starred romantic dramedy, which took in $12 million.

Perhaps most surprising is the poor performance of the David Zucker-produced comedy, An American Carol, a conservative-perspective send-up of filmmaker Michael Moore. Despite overwhelmingly positive reviews (except for a few liberal reviewers who panned it on political principal) and lots of publicity in the conservative talk-radio punditry, the film drew only an estimated $3.8 million on only 1,639 screens nationwide (about half the screens that ran Beverly Hills Chihuahua). That was good enough only for ninth place in the first week of release, against weak competition.

Liberals will no doubt take heart from the performance of the Bill Maher comedy, Religulous, which took tenth place behind An American Carol and drew $3.5 million despite playing on only 502 screens (or about one-third of the screens American Carol enjoyed). On a per-screen average, Religulous outperformed An American Carol considerably; An American Carol averaged $2,325 per screen, while Religulous averaged $6,972 per screen.

About the only comfort conservatives can take from this is that An American Carol received little in the way of traditional TV promotion, and Zucker, who was one of the minds behind the Airplane! movies, has not had a runaway box office hit in a couple decades now, so the box office performance of American Carol is not out of line with the appeal of his films in general.