Every once in a while, pundits will complain there aren’t enough strong women in the movies. The box office (these critics say) is dominated by an old boys’ club of manly superheroes and hairy hobbits, with nary a Wonder Woman or female elf in sight.
Call this weekend, then, the exception to the rule. On this post-Thanksgiving frame, the double-X chromosome reigned supreme.
Take a gander, for instance, at Katniss Everdeen’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which fought off all challengers for a second straight week. Sure, Catching Fire lost more than 50% of its audience, but it still collected a mammoth $74.5 million over the traditional three-day weekend—a bullseye no matter how you look at the target. If you throw in the extra two days for the Thanksgiving holiday, Catching Fire’s take rises to an estimated $110.1 million—the biggest five-day Thanksgiving weekend ever (breaking the old mark set by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 12 years ago). After just two weekends, Katniss and company have earned nearly $300 million domestically, trailing only Iron Man 3 ($409 million) and Despicable Me 2 ($367 million) for the year.
But unlike last weekend, Catching Fire had some competition this time out. Disney’s Frozen—which featured two (count ’em, two) princess protagonists—brought some icy thunder to this fight, earning a cool $66.7 million en route to its second-place finish. That, according to Box Office Mojo, is the second biggest second-place showing ever. Technically, this was Frozen’s second week in theaters (it screened at one solitary venue last week). And given the movie’s strong reviews, it looks like Frozen may have as much staying power as a magically durable snowman.
Thor: The Dark World is really the first testosterone-centric film on the box office docket. The red-caped superhero smashed to another $11.1 million payday, hammering down a third-place finish. The Best Man Holiday, with $8.5 million, finished fourth.
If we discount Frozen’s kinda-sorta debut, it proved to be a rough weekend for new entrants. Homefront made the biggest impact among these newcomers, earning about $7 million—but that might not even be enough to cover James Franco’s next avant garde art project. Still, it finished fifth, three spots higher than eighth-place Black Nativity, which earned just $3.9 million.
Final figures update: 1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, $74.2 million; 2. Frozen, $67.4 million; 3. Thor: The Dark World, $11.1 million; 4. The Best Man Holiday, $8.2 million; 5. Homefront, $6.9 million.
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