‘Frozen’ ices weekend competition

Undeterred by the weekend’s frigid temperatures and, in many areas, first major snowstorm of the year, audiences showed they were all about that ice by lining up for Disney’s Frozen. The animated hit grossed $31.6 million, enough to bypass The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (which took in $27 million) for the weekend’s top slot. Frozen dropped just 53% to earn the best post-Thanksgiving haul ever. Previous record-holder, Toy Story 2, took in $27.8 million in 1999, while three years ago, Frozen’s Mouse-House sister Tangled grossed $21.6 million over this same weekend. In total, Disney’s latest success story will likely earn around $250 million domestically.

Frozen’s worthy competitor Catching Fire continues to do spectacular business, on track to leave with upwards of $400 million by the time its theatrical run has come to an end, although many pundits were surprised by the film’s steep downturn this weekend. The Hunger Games sequel dipped 64%, which is worse than both of the last two Twilight movies.  No need to cry for Katniss, though: The action flick has, so far, earned a total of $336.7 million domestically, with another few weeks of solid earning potential ahead of it.

The same can’t be said of the weekend’s No. 3 slot and only new major release. While no one was particularly surprised Out of the Furnace failed to prove itself a hit, the extent of its failure was greater than expected. With a dismal $5.3 million bow, the revenge thriller is an unqualified bomb. Those who had compared it to last year’s Killing Them Softly, which earned $6.8 million and was also a disappointment, were expecting Furnace to fare a little better and gross about $10 million or so. Audiences, however, may have felt there was enough bleakness to be viewed outside their windows, and decided to opt for something lighter.

Something like Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, which inched past the $100 million mark to become the 6th R-rated comedy to reach the milestone this year. The Coen Bros. Inside Llewyn Davis also did banner specialty business, debuting to $401,000 from just four locations, two in New York and two in LA. Its per-theatre average of $100,250 is the 18th best ever, or 8th best for a live-action film. The movie will next expand on the 20th, although its wide release isn't slated until some time in January. 

Girl power propels Thanksgiving box office

Thanks to popular heroine Katniss Everdeen and a pair of sparring sisters, this year’s Thanksgiving weekend was the most lucrative on record. Hunger Games: Catching Fire continued to feed viewers’ appetite for action fare, love triangles, and watching Jennifer Lawrence drive both, earning an incredible $110 million over the five-day (Wednesday-Sunday) spread. Flying past Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which took in $82.4 million over the same period in 2001, Catching Fire is now the most successful film to have ever screened over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

Frozen, Catching Fire’s worthy challenger, set a record of its own these past several days. The Disney princess movie had the highest Thanksgiving opening of all time. It earned $93 million over Wednesday-Sunday night. Toy Story 2 previously held the record for most successful Thanksgiving debut, having opened to $80.1 million in 1999. Very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Snow Queen (they both involve siblings and chilly Nordic weather), Frozen is now the top earner for Disney Animation Studios, way ahead of Tangled and that title’s 2010 Thanksgiving haul of $68.7 million.

It was mostly due to the efforts of the aforementioned, female-driven offerings that the holiday box office tallied out at $294 million, an uptick of 3 percent from last year’s $291 million. No other films came close to the weekend’s top two earners. In third place, Thor: The Dark World continued to do steady, if no longer stellar, business, drumming up $11 million in sales, a drop of 22 percent from last weekend. The Best Man Holiday took in $8.5 million, boosting its overall cume, after two-and-a-half weeks in theatres, to $63.4 million.

And then there are the rest of those films that had hoped to score big with a Turkey Day debut. None of them managed to lure audiences away from their tables and subsequent leftovers – or rather, from Catching Fire and Frozen. Homefront earned $9.8 million over the five-day period; Black Nativity, which was expected to lead the charge of smaller new releases, earned just $5 million; and Oldboy bombed with $1.25 million.

The Book Thief did fine business, clocking in at $4.85 million, though it’s unclear how successful the Nazi-era family film will continue to be in the weeks ahead. Philomena, which opened in 835 theatres, earned $4.6 million, with high expectations for further steady sales.

Can ‘Frozen’ cool ‘Fire’s’ streak?

This year’s Thanksgiving weekend is serving up a battle of the elements, as Frozen goes head-to-head with reigning champion, Catching Fire. (Which reminds us of these classic antagonists.) The Disney animated musical and latest princess movie opens wide in 3,742 theatres today. The film’s tracking strong on Rotten Tomatoes at 88% fresh, and boasts a megawatt cast of Broadway stars, including Wicked’s Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad, as well as Kristen Bell as spunky and motormouthed protagonist Anna. Already, Frozen is out-selling 2010’s Tangled in advance ticket sales. Expectations, as they generally are for Disney family fare, are high, with pundits seeing receipts in the $70 million range.

Odds are, however, Catching Fire will continue to light up the box office. The successful Hunger Games sequel and Lionsgate’s early Christmas present (to themselves) had earned $170 million domestically as of Monday. It’ll likely hold strong through the weekend. Where previous November blockbuster Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II fell 69% over the holiday weekend, Catching Fire’s inevitable sophomore dip shouldn’t be more than 50, 55%.

Also hoping to wrangle a large slice of the holiday b.o. pie – or what’s left of it, anyway – Black Nativity, starring Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, and Angela Bassett; Homefront, with Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, and Kate Bosworth; and Oldboy, Spike Lee’s Korean cult-movie remake starring Josh Brolin, are all bowing today. Nativity, targeted toward an African American audience and opening just as the Christmas season begins in earnest, should perform the best of the bunch with around $10 million. Neither Homefront nor Oldboy have garnered particularly favorable reviews, but they can both count on built-in audiences (Statham fans, original Oldboy fanboys) to show up, regardless of a grousing peanut gallery. With Homefront opening in 2,572 theatres, it’s expected to gross in the high single digits. At just 583 locations, Oldboy will likely reap around $3 million.

There aren’t any specialty releases opening today, but Philomena and The Book Thief will both expand. Judi Dench and Steve Coogan’s odd-couple drama will broaden its audience base as it goes from screening in four to 835 theatres. Thief will open in 1,234 locations across the country and, most likely, gross between $5 and $9 million.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

'Tangled' climbs to the top

By Sarah Sluis

As predicted, Disney's Tangled rose from second place to first in its second week. The Rapunzel retelling dipped 55% to $21.5 million, a strong hold given that last weekend had higher-than-average traffic because of post-Thanksgiving crowds. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I took a steeper dive, falling 65% to $16.7 million. Many Harry Potter fans presumably saw the film shortly after its release, while Tangled should play well to families throughout the holiday season.

The Warrior's Way, a hybrid of the Asian action and Western genres, with some supernatural enemies as a bonus, eked out $3 million its opening weekend, below an estimated $5 million opening. The genre amalgamation follows this summer's sci-fi/comic book/Western flop Jonah Hex, and the (critical, sort of commercial) failure a decade before of another Western hybrid, Wild Wild West. Let it be known: The Western does not take kindly to genre mixing.

Just outside of the top ten, 127 Hours dipped 6% to $1.6 million as it increased the number of theatres showing the film by a third. Love and Other Drugs ($5.7 million) and Burlesque ($6.1 million), which both opened over the Thanksgiving holiday, fell in the 40% range. Thanks to the added holiday receipts, each of these films has each crossed the $20 million mark.

As prestige, awards-seeking movies make their end-of-the-year debuts, per-screen averages of specialty films have skyrocketed. Multiple films posted averages in the tens of thousands. Leading the pack with the highest average of the week, Black Swan opened in 18 locations to a stunning $77,000 per-screen average. Another Oscar frontrunner, The King's Speech, in its second week, made a comfortable slide into a $55,000 per-screen average as it went from four to six theatres. All Good Things, the true-crime drama, tallied up $20,000 per screen at two locations, just ahead of I Love You, Phillip Morris, which averaged $18,000 per screen at six locations.

This Friday, Tangled will have some competition from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a former Disney franchise that has been passed to Fox. The Angelina Jolie-Johnny Depp smoldering thriller The Tourist will offer adults some fresh intrigue set in an exotic location, and another Oscar contender, The Fighter, will hit select theatres.

Disney teases 'Tangled,' 'Tron: Legacy'

By Sarah Sluis

After Disney releases Secretariat this Friday, it has two big releases left on its 2010 slate: Tangled, the studio's fiftieth animated feature and a return to fairy tale princesses, and Tron: Legacy, a supersized sequel to the 1982 cult hit. I had the chance to watch 20 minutes of Tron: Legacy in 2D and a feature-length version of Tangled in unfinished form, also in 2D.

First up, Tron: Legacy. I came into the preview with pretty low expectations. The first Tron teaser trailer, which you can watch on YouTube, starts and ends with a motorcycle chase scene. It looks "cool," but not enough to make me care. I need plot. Based on the preview I saw, the actual film should have appeal that extends beyond fanboys. Sean Bailey, Disney's head of production, dropped the term "character-driven," and I really hope that's true. The scenes we saw set up a compelling relationship between the father Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund). Sam feels abandoned by his father, who mysteriously disappeared when he was a child, and their reunion scene is ice-cold. Clearly something will have to happen to bring father and son closer together.

We also saw a short portion in 3D, which revealed that the movie will use a strategy that Alice in Wonderland should have: all the real-life sequences will be in 2D, and the sequences inside the video-game world will be in 3D (note: this could change, but was consistent with the footage I saw).

My takeaway: The footage changed my outlook from "don't care" to "I will need to see this."

Next up, Tangled. Those that grew up with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast will experience a

little bit of deja vu within the entirely new and oh-so-gently parodic Tangled. Though the directors firmly claim the animated feature is not a parody, the male love interest (and him alone) is given some Shrek-inspired goofiness. When a character says at the end of a fairy tale, "You're probably wondering if we get married?" how can you not say you're poking a little bit of fun at the genre?

Tangled will score the most points for turning the passive Rapunzel character, burdened by her long locks, into a strong, determined young woman whose hair is part weapon, part magical tool. She's also a blonde-haired, beautiful girl who favors pink and purple dresses, but let's stop while we're ahead. In one of the funniest and most realistic sequences, she's struck by a mixture of guilt and giddy freedom after leaving her tower/prison. How true! What kid doesn't feel a little wistful when striking out on their own, and the move also underscores the psychologically manipulative relationship the princess has with her "mother."

While many of the most sweeping scenes were presented in unfinished form, one was completed. A scene in which thousands of magic lanterns rise into the sky displayed the most startlingly beautiful luminescence I have ever seen in CG animation. Animated movies have begun to really raise the bar in their visual look--How to Train Your Dragon and Wall-E, for example, had a high-end, live-action look to them. Tangled is a bit of a mix, with some details seeming more cartoony (like too-smooth faces and rather generic interiors), while other rise above. The forest seems enchanted, conveying a diverse topography. While falling in the "cartoon" category, the expressive horse Maximus and chameleon Pascal are two of the most charming characters in the movie (though the horse wins by several body lengths, so to speak).

Tangled has songs--but they fall to the background. Mandy Moore, a singer, voices Rapunzel, and Broadway veteran Donna Murphy (the witchy mother) performs her songs with impeccable elocution. The brief, haunting tune that Rapunzel sings to activate her hair has the most impact, but Rapunzel's opening "I Wish" song (learn more about the trope here) fails to ignite. To be fair, I heard the songs before they were mixed with surround sound and mastered, which could bump up their impact, but the soundtrack didn't seem the focus here.

Each of these films should do incredibly well for Disney. I hope Tron: Legacy has even more special-effects tricks up its sleeve than I saw, and that Tangled's unfinished scenes end up just as awe-inspiring as the magic lantern scenes. Mark your calendars: Disney's set list is one of the best in town. And check out my pictures from Disney's post-screening reception below, completed with one blue Tron-inspired side of the room, and another decked out in Medieval ivy and giant lanterns.

Tangled:

Tron: Legacy: