This weekend’s box office saw the previous weekend champions swap places, with Disney’s Frozen taking the top slot from Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. As expected, the drama Out of the Furnace with Christian Bale flopped, proving that the wide opening for dramas on a film’s first weekend this time of year is not the best route.
Frozen thawed 53 percent from last week, but its $31.6 million was enough to top Catching Fire. Box Office Mojo notes that it did better than 2010’s Tangled, which dropped 56 percent over its second weekend. It’s also the best post-Thanksgiving weekend for a movie since Toy Story 2 grossed $27.8 million.
Catching Fire fell a whopping 64 percent from its record Thanksgiving weekend, only bringing in $27 million this weekend.
Meanwhile, Out of the Furnace, directed by Crazy Heart’s Scott Cooper, may be a decent movie, but audiences around the country just weren’t in the mood. The film opened at 2,101 locations and grossed just $5.3 million. It’s off to a worse start than last year’s Brad Pitt drama Killing Them Softly, which opened to $6.8 million around the same time.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Furnace also scored just a C+ CinemaScore grade from audiences, which means that it doesn’t have a chance at sticking around. The audience was also 60 percent male.
Disney’s Thor: The Dark World came in fourth with $4.7 million, bringing its domestic total to $193.6 million. Delivery Man, another disney release, is sticking around, grossing $3.8 million.
Also, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis grossed an astonishing $401,000 from just two theaters in New York and two more in Los Angeles.
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