The previous five-day record over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with $82.3 million. The same film also held the record for the highest three day total with $57.4 million. Well, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire saw those records and flew right by, bringing in $74.5 million over the three-day and a massive $110.2 million for the five-day. The film is now up to $296.5 million domestically and over $573 million worldwide. After just ten days the sequel is only $7 million shy of the first film’s overseas total.
The $74.5 million weekend is the fourth largest second weekend of all-time, behind The Avengers, Avatar and The Dark Knight.
The big news doesn’t stop there as Disney’s Frozen would be able to call itself a multiple record breaker had it not been for Jennifer Lawrence‘s Katniss stealing the thunder, but one record it can certainly claim is the highest Thanksgiving weekend opening as it soared to a massive $66.7 million for the three-day. In fact, it also broke the five-day opening weekend record bringing in $92.7 million. I speculated it could go over $50 million when writing up Laremy’s weekend predictions, but I certainly didn’t expect more than $60 million.
The previous three and five-day opening records were held by 1999’s Toy Story 2 ($57.3m/$80.1m) and yes, it is still considered an opening weekend despite the one theater special event held last weekend. Don’t ask me to explain, I don’t make up the rules, but with this kind of opening and an “A+” CinemaScore I expect Frozen will be around for a long, long time.
The other widest new opening this weekend was Homefront starring Jason Statham and James Franco and it couldn’t even live up to modest expectations, bringing in only $6.9 million for the three-day and $9.7 million for the five-day. Too bad, because it’s actually a rather fun film.
As for Spike Lee‘s Oldboy remake, it was playing in only 583 theaters and FilmDistrict didn’t report any totals on the film after its Wednesday opening until just today, announcing it made an estimated $850,000 over the three-day weekend and only $1.25 million for the five-day. Ouch! That is not good. FilmDistrict noted in their report they had limited exposure on the film and expect to see some traction in the home entertainment and other ancillary arenas.
On the smaller side of things, the movie everyone should take their mother too, Philomena, was strong in only 835 theaters, bringing in $3.7 million, almost beating another one of the weekend’s new openers, Black Nativity, which managed only $3.8 million.
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is playing in only 102 theaters and brought in $728,000 while the Weinsteins opened Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in only four theaters where it made only $100,300.
Expect to see Frozen and Catching Fire battling it out for #1 again next weekend as Out of the Furnace and Inside Llewyn Davis open in only four theaters (Out of the Furnace expands on the 6th to approximately 2,000 theaters) each without any major wide competition, but based on the $203 million spent on the top two films over the last five days, I expect there will be others willing to contribute to the cause.
