NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED THROUGHOUT TO REFLECT OFFICIAL STUDIO ESTIMATES FOR THURSDAY.
As is customary during Christmas-New Year’s week, the majority of the holiday movies stayed fairly stable on Thursday, varying only a few hundred thousand dollars from the day before. The major exception, based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, was LES MISERABLES (Universal), which continued to drop sharply, down another 25% from Wednesday to $9.1M (a total of $39.3M in 3 days). This pushed Les Miz out of first place for the day, and put the movie’s Thursday number at just half of its opening only two days earlier. The movie seems to be having trouble breaking through to a general audience beyond its core fans–a large number in itself, to be sure–and the weekend, with what should be moderately higher boxoffice, is coming just in time.
DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony) is also falling, but somewhat less steeply, down 17% from Wednesday to $8.7M ($33.3M since its Tuesday opening).
With the newcomers faltering, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) moved back into 1st place, down just 11% to $10.1M on Thursday. It’s made $189.7M in the US thus far, and is over $500M worldwide. Hobbit has a chance of reaching $300M in the US, which would still lag behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy (with their lower ticket prices), but would at least be creditable.
The remainder of the Top 10 were within $300K of their Wednesday totals, except that with parents increasingly frantic for something to take their kids to see, both RISE OF THE GUARDIANS (DreamWorks Animation/Paramount) and MONSTERS INC 3D (Disney/Pixar) climbed a bit, by $200K and $300K respectively.
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