The weekend box office was a surprising one, but only if you predicted that a superhero movie wouldn’t win against little competition, and that a film aimed at a “niche” audience wouldn’t have a strong showing against it. As predicted by most, Thor: The Dark World won the weekend again with $38.5 million, bringing its total thus far to $147 million despite a 55 percent decline in audience, comparable to Iron Man 3 earlier this year. The first Thor film is among the lowest grossing of the Avengers properties (the first Captain America did slightly less than Thor), but the Avengers film has clearly given the other heroes a boost, and The Dark World will likely end with a gross in the 200 millions, much higher than the original’s $181 million.
As the only new release this weekend, a nice bit of counterprogramming and a film that plays to the often-ignored marketplace for black-centric films, The Best Man Holiday, a sequel to a film that made a decent-if-unspectacular $34 million in 1999, opened to $30.6 million, one of the highest recent openings for a film with a predominantly black cast. The film had strong support from the black community, with 87 percent of the audience identifying as African-American, along with 63 percent of the audience being above 35 and 75 percent of the audience being female. It’s likely that with the holiday theme, the film will stick around for a while and prove to be a decent hit in a notoriously underserved market.
The only other new release of the weekend, the new Alexander Payne film Nebraska, opened to $140,000 in four locations, yet another decent showing for an Oscar hopeful that will hopefully translate well as it heads into wide release. Another Oscar hopeful, Dallas Buyers Club, added another 100+ screens and moved up to number 12 on the chart, taking in $1.7 million.
Next week will see the release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which will undoubtedly be the winner.
Full chart at BoxOfficeMojo.com
