Box Office Weekend – ‘The Grinch’ Steals a Christmas Record

Box Office
This weekend at the box office, The Grinch sets a new record for a movie about Christmas, all the while putting the blitzkrieg on Overlord and entrapping The Girl in the Spider’s Web.

 

Meet the new Grinch, same as the old Grinch… But with better overall box office potential, it seems. 2018’s animated take on Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! has managed to snag a record from 2000’s live-action adaptation in that the newer version stole the older version’s record ($66M vs $55M) for the biggest opening weekend for a movie about Christmas ever. Not only that, but the newer version is actually substantially less expensive than the movie that it’s technically a remake of, meaning that it will take less for the movie to reach the point of profitability for Universal.

 

While this weekend’s other, more adult-oriented movies were even less expensive to make, it looks like they might both be dead on arrival. Both the $38M-budgeted Overlord and the $43M-budgeted The Girl in the Spider’s Web would have thrived with openings in the mid-teens, but Paramount’s zombie flick limped past $10M while Sony’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo quasi-sequel was left tangled in its own web with $8M.

 

Conversely, Fox’s Queen/Freddie Mercury biopic is singing “Don’t Stop Me Now” pretty loudly right about now with a second-weekend drop of under 40%. If you’re getting a case of déjà vu, it’s because Fox released a different musical late last year with mixed critical reception but clearly good enough word-of-mouth that it was able to reach profitability regardless. The thing most starkly differing Bohemian Rhapsody from The Greatest Showman seems to be that the jukebox musical actually had a great opening, and while it might not have the same kind of legs as its predecessor due to coming before the holiday season, it will get a pretty good boost out of Thanksgiving.

 

The Top Twelve box office performances for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):

  1. The Grinch (Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment) – $66M Total.
  2. Bohemian Rhapsody (20th Century Fox) – $30.85M Weekend/$100.01M Total; 39.6% Drop.
  3. Overlord (Paramount Pictures/Bad Robot) – $10.1M Total.
  4. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (Disney) – $9.565M Weekend/$35.256M Total; 53% Drop.
  5. The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Sony Pictures) – $8.015M Total.
  6. A Star is Born (Warner Bros.) – $8.01M Weekend/$178.02M Total; 27.2% Drop.
  7. Nobody’s Fool (Paramount Pictures) – $6.54M Weekend/$24.276M Total; 52.4% Drop.
  8. Venom (Sony Pictures) – $4.85M Weekend/$206.233M Total; 38.4% Drop.
  9. Halloween (Universal Pictures/Blumhouse Productions) – $3.84M Weekend/$156.81M Total; 64.5% Drop.
  10. The Hate U Give (20th Century Fox/Fox 2000 Pictures) – $2.07M Weekend/$26.705M Total; 38.3% Drop.
  11. Smallfoot (Warner Bros./Warner Animation Group) – $1.505M Weekend/$80.306M Total; 61% Drop.
  12. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (20th Century Fox/Fox Searchlight Pictures) – $1.475M Weekend/$3.609M Total; 42.9% Rise.

VenomA Star is BornHalloween, Bohemian Rhapsody, and The Grinch are now playing in theaters.