Happy Thanksgiving to all! Wednesday was a great day for both THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) and the new FROZEN (Disney), setting the stage for a sensational holiday box office weekend for the pair.
Catching Fire zoomed 30% from Tuesday to $20.7M, blowing past the record for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving ($14.4M for the next-to-last Harry Potter). It has a strong chance of topping $100M for the full 5-day holiday weekend, which would be way ahead of the current $82.4M record (for the very first Harry Potter), with $65M of it coming from the Friday-Sunday period (another record). That should put it at $285-290M by Sunday, which would be roughly $40M ahead of the original Hunger Games after 10 days of release.
Frozen is also off to a torrid start with $15.2M on Wednesday. That’s far above the $11.9M opening day for Tangled, and as a family movie Frozen will really take off as the holiday goes on. It could reach $90M for the 5-day weekend, neck-and-neck with Catching Fire on Friday-Sunday, and with great word-of-mouth assured and no other animated films opening until Walking With Dinosaurs 3 weeks from now, its path to $200M+ is as smooth as an ice field.
Other holiday newcomers were way behind. HOMEFRONT (Open Road), the latest Jason Statham action vehicle (with a script by Sylvester Stallone) took in $1.4M on Wednesday, and mignt not even get to $8M by Sunday. The bigger-than-expected opening of The Best Man Holiday led to a fair amount of buzz about under-estimation of the black audience, but if anything, BLACK NATIVITY (Fox Searchlight) will come in below expectations, with a lousy $440K on Thursday at 1516 theatres that may only give it $3M by Sunday (a terrible $2K per-theatre average). Even that looked good compared to Spike Lee’s OLDBOY (FilmDistrict), barely marketed by its distributor in a low 583-theatre release, which had a $215K Wednesday and will struggle to reach $1.5M at the end of the weekend (a $2500 average).
Wednesday also brought several major expansions for awards hopefuls, none of them very promising. THE BOOK THIEF (20th) widened to 1234 theatres and managed $725K for the day, with perhaps $7M for the weekend, a merely OK $5500 per-theatre average. PHILOMENA (Weinstein) expanded to 753 theatres and had $375K on Wednesday for a $3.5M 5-day holiday and a slow $4500 average. On a smaller scale, NEBRASKA (Paramount) grew to 102 theatres with $80K on Wednesday and perhaps $600K by Sunday, a soft $6K average.
Among holdovers, THOR: THE DARK WORLD (Disney) is still strong with $2.3M on Wednesday and what should be a $17.5M 5-day weekend, which would put it ahead of the first Thor‘s $181M at the US box office with plenty of punch left. For the first time, 12 YEARS A SLAVE (Fox Searchlight) lost theatres due to the flood of new product in the marketplace, and it may have $2.5M for the Friday-Sunday part of the holiday, which would be down marginally from last weekend.
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