As it does every year, the Thanksgiving holiday brought increased box office numbers all around, although the number 1 slot remained a holdover from before the holiday. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire held on with $74.5 million for the three-day window, a 52 percent drop from the previous week but still an excellent second weekend total that marks the best Thanksgiving weekend showing since the original Harry Potter. The film has racked up $296 million so far, putting it $50 million ahead of what the original film grossed in the first 10 days.
The Wednesday Thanksgiving releases were mostly successful, with the second-place slot going to the latest offering from the Disney princess division, Frozen. After an impressive showing on a single screen last weekend, Frozen racked up $66.7 million over the weekend and $93.3 million since Wednesday. This is quite a bit higher than Tangled, which opened in the same time frame to $48 million in 2010, but Frozen did get a bit of a bump from 3D ticket sales. At number 5 was Homefront, the Jason Statham/James Franco faceoff movie that served as counterprogramming for the action crowd – it grossed $6.9 million over the weekend and $9.7 million over the 5-day frame, a decent showing but perhaps not enough to top the $22 million budget. In 8th place was Black Nativity, which didn’t quite capture the Christian audience (although it did only open on 1500 screens) and grossed $3.8 million over the weekend and $5 million overall. The real surprise was the very low gross of the Spike Lee remake of Oldboy, which only opened on 583 screens yet made a paltry $850,000 for the weekend and $1.25 million overall. It’s likely that the subject matter, the director, or the crowded marketplace contributed to the low numbers.
In indie news, the pre-expansion 4-screen release of Mandela: Walk to Freedom made $100,300, a $25,000 screen average. And the previous pre-expansion releases of Philomena and The Book Thief went wide over the weekend to decent results. The Book Thief made $4.85 million and Philomena made $3.8 million, suggesting mild successes in the Oscar hopeful circuit but not much appeal otherwise.
Source: BoxOfficeMojo
One thought on “Weekend Box Office: “Catching Fire,” “Frozen” Dominate Thanksgiving”
Hopefully the low numbers from Oldboy will persuade them from remaking other Korean films anytime soon. Although I don’t see that happening unfortunately.