With sequels and retreads dominating the box office in 2011, it’s somehow fitting that a squadron of holdovers would ring in the new year.
Granted, Hollywood seemed disinclined to release anything new for the New Year holiday: The only new release anywhere was The Iron Lady, which debuted in a whopping four theaters (and earned an impressive $221,000). Everything else was old news—but this time around, it seems like old news was good news for the entertainment industry.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol repeated as box office champ this week, scoring $29.6 million in North America over the traditional 3-day weekend run (and $38.3 million if you take Monday into the mix). That’s actually a tiny uptick from what the film made the weekend before—a rarity in an age in which first-weekend grosses are thought to make or break a film. Perhaps many Americans opted to spend Christmas at home, singing carols with our family … but when it came to turning the calendar, we celebrated by watching Tom Cruise flap in the wind while hanging from a half-mile-high skyscraper.
In fact, almost every film earned more this weekend than last. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows held onto its second-place rank with $21 million, a nearly 4% jump. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked nibbled another $16.4 million—nearly 30% above what it earned the weekend before—to take third place away from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (despite a $14.8 million, 16% improvement of its own).
And War Horse, that moving bit of vintage Steven Spielberg, thundered into fifth place with $14.4 million—a whopping 91.5% jump over its Christmas showing. A couple more weekends like that, and this film will indeed be a horse of a different color: green.
Only one other film in the Top 10 had a bigger New Year’s bump, in fact—a film that saw its box-office grosses rise nearly 93%, from $3.3 million to $6.4 million.
That’d be New Year’s Eve, of course.
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