'Hottie' a nottie at the box office

You can lead a gossip-loving fan to water, you can even dip their heads in the water, but you can't make them drink. Or even take a sip. A thousand people may line up at the Franklin Mills Mall and wait for hours to catch a glimpse of

Paris Hilton

but they won't pay money to see her in a movie.

Following in the cinematic bomb mushroom cloud of Jessica Simpson's straight-to-DVD "Blonde Ambition," or the playing-to-empty-outpost-theaters Pam Anderson-Denise Richards fiasco "Blonde and Blonder," Paris's "The Hottie and the Nottie" opened this weekend with box office numbers that would make Lindsay Lohan's "I Know Who Killed Me" disaster look like "Titanic."

Playing in 111 theaters, the weekend estimate for "The Hottie" was a "Nottie" - $25,000.

Total. An average of $225 per theater or, two, maybe three people per showing. And Vince Vaughn's pull didn't do much for his "Wild West Comedy Tour." In 962 theaters it grossed $507,000 - $527 per theater.

By comparison, Focus Features' "In Bruges," with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, opening here Friday, made more than $16,000 per theater at 28 spots. *

Daily News wire services contributed to this report.