It was a decent but not spectacular Thanksgiving weekend at the box office, with nothing really blowing away the competition gross-wise and none of the new releases doing insanely huge business. Although there were several new releases on the indie and mainstream fronts, the third installment in the Hunger Games franchise took the top slot again, taking in $56.8 million for the weekend and $82.6 million since Wednesday, the third highest grossing five-day frame on record, although well behind Catching Fire‘s $109.9 million in the same time period. Mockingjay Part 1 sits at $225 million overall, and should keep going strong well into December.
Among the new releases, the winner was The Penguins of Madagascar in second place, capitalizing on the family-oriented holiday and taking in $25,8 million for the weekend and $36 million for the five-day frame. That’s higher than a lot of the recent Dreamworks animated openings, but still not that great of a showing, so hopefully the film will be able to have legs in the coming weeks with minimal family competition until Christmas. On the very opposite end of the spectrum was Horrible Bosses 2, which opened in fifth place with $15.7 million for the three-day and $23 million for the five-day frames. That’s well below the original’s $28 million debut, and doesn’t bode well for the movie’s legs, but considering the budget was only $43 million, the movie will likely make its money back in the coming weeks.
On the indie side of things, the big news was the limited release of the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which rode its Benedict Cumberbatch presence to $482,000 on four screens. That’s a $120,500 per-theater average, the second highest of the year. Among old releases are two points of note. Interstellar actually managed to increase its gross by 3 percent from last weekend, adding $15.8 million to its $147 million total, a rarity for a movie that’s been out for nearly a month. And The Theory of Everything went wide and added $5 million to its $9.6 million total, about right for a movie that’s well on its way to being an Oscar favorite.
Next weekend brings Reese Witherspoon’s Oscar bid, Wild, and not much else, so a good weekend to catch up with what’s already out there.
Source: BoxOfficeMojo
