Audiences weren’t staying home this Thanksgiving as films such as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, Skyfall and Lincoln dominated the top three slots at the box-office and contributed to the best five-day Thanksgiving weekend ever. The previous record was 2009’s $258.6 million, but that number went down in flames to an estimated $288 million for this year’s offerings, which also bests 2009’s best five-day weekend overall which was previously $270.5 million. Yeah, it was a big one.
On top was Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 for a second weekend in a row, dropping 69.5% and bringing in $43 million with a cumulative total that is now $226.9 million domestically and $577.7 million worldwide, which brings the franchise’s overall total to over $3 billion. While this thing is over for now, I have a hard time imagining Summit is going to leave Edward and Bella on the sidelines for too long.
In second is Skyfall, which is just tearing up the worldwide box-office, adding another $36 million over the three-day for a domestic total of $221.7 million and as of the publishing of this post, it was sitting at over $729 million worldwide, but that is sure to go up over the course of the day and tomorrow once additional international figures roll in. It would appear Bond is back and in a big way.
The folks over at Dreamworks have got to be happy as Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln continues to impress at the box-office as it added 243 more theaters this weekend and is now playing on just over 2,000 screens where it brought in $25 million. In just three weeks it has managed to bring in $65 million and it would appear is only getting started, averaging $12,398 per theater and with plenty more room to expand. It was up 19% from last weekend. Oscar prospects are certainly looking better and better and I have to assume Daniel Day-Lewis has already made room for number three.
In fourth we finally get to one of the week’s newcomers in Dreamworks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians, a 3-D animated film that reportedly cost $145 million to produce and over the five-day brought in a meager $32.6 million and, unfortunately, saw only declining numbers from Friday to Saturday to Sunday, which isn’t a good sign for an animated family film.
On the flip side, 20th Century Fox’s Life of Pi from Ang Lee got out of the gates slowly, but climbed from Wednesday to Thursday to Friday, plateauing out on Saturday and dipping on Sunday. Over the five days it brought in $30.1 million and with an “A-” CinemaScore it will be interesting to see how this film turns out not only domestically but worldwide. One thing is for certain, we’re looking at a film with a massive $120 million budget so while gains are good it’s going to need some legs and positive buzz to make up for that budget.
We slide down to seventh for another newcomer and the absolute worst film in the top ten, Red Dawn. Audiences were in a charitable mood and gave this one a “B” CinemaScore and $22 million worth of ticket sales over the course of five days, but I only hope they paid that money and snuck into see something else. Paying good money to watch this bad movie is akin to just lighting it on fire.
Then, in ninth, Silver Linings Playbook is starting to pick up a bit as it is still playing in only 367 theaters and managed $4.6 million over the three-day weekend for a modest $12,597 per theater average though, as a fan of this film, I really wish it had done much better.
Hitchcock topped the films opening in limited release this weekend with $301,000 from 17 theaters, which also isn’t much to brag about even though it does make it the weekend’s per theater average winner, while the buzzed about documentary The Central Park Five opened in three theaters to $33,900 and Rust and Bone opened in two New York theaters and brought in $30,200.
We will largely be talking about all the same movies next weekend as the Weinstein Co. has the lone release in Andrew Dominik’s fantastic Killing Them Softly, which I plan on seeing a second time tomorrow, though they are only bringing it to 2,000 theaters so a third week repeat for Twilight should probably be expected.
