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Box Office – The Grinch Steals It, Bohemian Rhapsody Plays On

It’s The Grinch that stole the box office this weekend – more accurately, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch did $66 million domestic to put it at the top of the box office listings. Bohemian Rhapsody is that second in line, the Queen, with a hold on of a respectable $30 million plus to take second place. Coming up a distant third is Overlord, closely followed by both The Nutcracker and The Girl in the Spider’s Web. A Star Is Born continues to earn, then we start to fall off down to very much lower ranked takings.

The top 10 looks like this:

1 N Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (2018) Uni. $66,000,000
2 1 Bohemian Rhapsody Fox $30,850,000
3 N Overlord Par. $10,100,000
4 2 The Nutcracker and the Four Realms BV $9,565,000
5 N The Girl in the Spider’s Web: $8,015,000
6 4 A Star is Born (2018) WB $8,010,000
7 3 Nobody’s Fool Par. $6,540,000
8 6 Venom (2018) Sony $4,850,000
9 5 Halloween (2018) Uni. $3,840,000
10 10 The Hate U Give Fox $2,070,000

On the subject of The Grinch Variety gives it a good review – it’s close to the book for example, not that oddity that was the Jim Carrey version:

In the bright and spangly new computer-animated fairy tale “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch,” the same dynamic exists, at least in the abstract: A story born to be a succint marvel of Seussian narrative gets finessed and inflated into a feature-length movie. Yet there’s a crucial difference. The last thing that the film’s directors, Yarrow Cheney (“The Secret Life of Pets”) and Scott Mosier, want to be accused of is trashing a beloved classic again. So there’s a distinct sensation, in their visual and narrative embellishments, of the movie doing all it can to stay true to the look and feel and inner spirit of the 1966 special.

Bohemian Rhapsody continues to do well:

Bohemian Rhapsody rallied a little over the weekend, earning $30 million in its second Fri-Sun frame to get over the $100m domestic milestone. That’s a 40% drop from its larger-than-expected $51m launch, and a superb 3.52x weekend multiplier. The film played around 3% better among those under 25 and 3% better than those 18-34 on this weekend than it did last weekend, which may slightly explain the Saturday upturn. Anyway, the film has now earned $100m in ten days of domestic release and has earned a whopping $185m overseas thus far on a $55m budget.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web should probably be considered a failure at this point:

On the other hand, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, starring Claire Foy, opened to a disappointing $8 million from 2,929 locations in a blow to Sony, MGM and New Regency’s attempt to reboot the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. The $43 million film, dismissed by many critics, is currently tied with A Star Is Born, now in its sixth weekend, for fifth place. The order won’t be decided until Monday morning.

Directed by Fede Alvarez, Girl in the Spider’s Web is likewise struggling overseas, where it took in $6.2 million from 49 markets for an early foreign total of $8.2 million and $16.3 million globally.

Not that this was a particularly bright nor important weekend in the release calendar. Obviously so, when it’s a tie between a rock biopic and a kiddies’ Christmas movie. But then hope springs eternal, we’ll see next week.

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