Ron Weasley A Bit of a Slacker in the Box-Office Dept.

Looks like Ron Weasley has another thing to feel inferior about. The Daily Telegraph notes that, in the new edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, the highest-grossing lead actors of the decade are none other than Harry Potter stars David Radcliffe and Emma Watson. Thanks in large part to the enormously-successful fantasy franchise, Radcliffe's films have averaged $558 million. Watson's average, meanwhile, stands at a mind-blowing $753.7 million, thanks to both the Potter films and her voiceover work in 2008's The Tale of Desperaux.

But where, you might ask, is Rupert Grint (AKA, Ron) in all of this? It's actually quite puzzling. None of them performed in more than a couple of films outside the Potter franchise this decade, theoretically placing all three actors on a relatively similar playing field in terms of box-office averages. And while Desperaux's $86.9 million worldwide earnings clearly puts Watson out front (Hermione, forever the overachiever), the relatively comparable grosses for Radcliffe's forgettable 2007 indie flick

So what's the deal? For one, Radcliffe has an ace up his sleeve. Before he was Harry, he was "Mark Pendel" in John Boorman's well-received 2001 The Tailor of Panama, which took in $28 million overall. But the bigger surprise is the box-office skeleton in Grint's closet that presumably dragged down his average: Thunderpants, a 2002 British comedy in which, according to the imdb.com plot synopsis, a boy's "amazing ability to break wind leads him first to fame and then to death row, before it helps him to fulfill his ambition of becoming an astronaut." Huh. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it grossed little more than the equivalent of $3 million when released in the United Kingdom.

In fairness to Grint, he did not play Thunderpants' gassy protagonist. Nevertheless, it's perhaps proof that the mistakes of youth really do come back to haunt you when you least expect it.