Anchorman Ron Burgundy, despite making roughly 3 million personal appearances and boasting salon-quality hair, couldn’t find a way to pull a certain dragon off of his heap of box office gold.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug singed Burgundy’s hair and lit up the weekend for an estimated $31.5 million. Sure, that’s about a 57% decline from where it stood just a week ago, but it still brings up this Tolkienesque tale to $127.5 million for the year—a tidy sum to haul back to the Shire.
Clearly, Burgundy’s no dragon killer. But he and the rest of the cast of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues made some decent moola themselves. The flick earned $26.8 million despite our critic Bob Hoose calling it “Meaninglessly strange, regularly crass and deliberately doltish.” ‘Course, that’s what some Anchorman fans love about these flicks, so we’ll have to watch how Anchorman 2 performs down the stretch to see if we’re destined for Anchorman 3: Revenge of the Styling Mousse.
Disney’s Frozen duked it out for third place with Oscar hopeful American Hustle. Early figures gave Frozen $19.2 million, while Hustle banked $19.1 million. But we’re rounding those numbers off, and the real difference between the two is just a scant $63,000, or about what Hustle’s Bradley Cooper likely spent on hair rollers. Check back in to see which flick earned the bronze.
Saving Mr. Banks, another Academy Award contender from Disney, rounds out the Top 5 with what prognosticators are calling a “disappointing” showing. Banks is actually one of my favorite Oscar-bait movies of 2013, and I’m hoping the film shows some Mary Poppins-like gumption. In the meantime, Disney execs will need a spoonful of sugar to deal with this weekend’s bad-tasting medicine.
Still, it did better than the CGI spectacle Walking With Dinosaurs, which finished eighth with $7.3 million. And given that Christmas will see the release of about 163 more new movies (well, OK, five more are hitting a wide release), it seems as though Dinosaurs could soon be extinct.
Final figures update: 1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, $31.5 million; 2. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues; 3. Frozen, $19.6 million; 4. American Hustle, $19.1 million; 5. Saving Mr. Banks, $9.3 million.
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