Thanksgiving weekend gives films 2 extra days to make money and a lot of movies get helped out from that extra time. However, outside of “Frozen” it didn’t seem to help this weekend. A few movies opened on very few screens, such as the Spike Lee remake of “Oldboy.” It only opened on 583, but it still did poorly making $1.25 million over the full 5 days which put it at 17th place. “Catching Fire” broke a record previously held by the first Harry Potter film for making money on Thanksgiving weekend and moved into 3rd place for the top movies of the year. Here is the full breakdown:
- Catching Fire: $74.5 million, which is down about 53% but it did $110 over the five day pushing it close to $300 million total.
- Frozen: $66.7 million and $93 for the 5 day, pushing it above Toy Story 2 and Tangled, both of which opened on Thanksgiving. It also broke a record for the highest ever second place opening film, which is just a weird record anyway.
- Thor: The Dark World: This is where the drop off starts. Thor got $11.1 million; it is still doing well and has made back it’s budget on the domestic gross alone.
- The Best Man Holiday: At $8.4 million this one is just holding out from 5th place and bringing it’s total up to $63 million.
- Homefront: Jason Statham does not bring the dollars. At $6.9 million this just barely beat out the Vince Vaughn bomb “Delivery Man” for the 5th place spot. Technically this is the only movie that opened last weekend, “Frozen” actually opened on 1 screen the week before.
Next week I don’t expect things to change much in terms of rank. The Coen brothers new film “Inside Llewyn Davis” opens but that is about it. However, the next week we get the new Hobbit film, I’m expecting big numbers from that.