The Christmas/New Years holiday movie season drew to a close this weekend, with the kids going back to school and everyone returning to work tomorrow. Considering that there’s an absolutely brutal cold front moving in to most of the upper part of the U.S. and it’s been snowing in the same areas, it’s a little surprising that the number 1 movie this weekend was winter-themed.
But Disney came out on top again with Frozen, which has held up remarkably well in its sixth week of release with $20.7 million, which is the third highest sixth-weekend tally ever and the first movie to have the top spot in week 6 since Avatar back in 2010. The movie has accumulated $297.6 million so far, a healthy tally.
Most of the other winter releases have held on strongly and taken in healthy grosses over the past couple of weeks. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug held on to third place with $16.2 million and a $229 million haul to date, putting it on track for a respectable high-$200 million gross overall and only slightly less than its predecessor. Riding a wave of controversy, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street took fourth place with $16.3 million and a $63 million total, which will likely increase if the film scores Oscar nominations. And despite some people predicting that the oversaturation of advertising would hurt its box office changes, Anchorman 2 came in sixth place with $11.1 million and a $109 million total – with a production budget of $50 million and an original installment that topped out at $85 million grosses, it’s a good showing for a comedy sequel.
The only new release of the weekend was Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, which came in second with an $18.2 million gross. That puts it at the lowest opening for a Paranormal film to date (the fourth installment opened with $29 million), and suggests an overcrowded market, a lack of interest in a horror movie in January and some level of fatigue in the franchise (the Saw and Final Destination series received similar dropoffs by their fifth installments). Still, the combined production budgets for the five Paranormal films totaled $18.1 million before marketing, so they’ve always had a high return on investment for Paramount, and it’s likely we’ll see a couple more before the franchise is put to rest.
Source: BoxOfficeMojo
