What did Santa Claus (or whatever treasured, commercialist holiday figure Scientologists eagerly await this time of year) bring Tom Cruise this Christmas? A box-office win for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
Granted, the payoff wasn’t massive: an estimated $29.5 million over the traditional three-day weekend (and $46.2 million if you’re counting Monday, which many of us had off). But in a year when studios have been used to getting coal each weekend, the MI take was worth raising a flagon of eggnog in celebration. Tom Cruise’s fourth run as super-spy Ethan Hunt has collected $62 million already. Sure, the folks at Paramount spent an estimated $145 million to make the thing, but hey. They’ll take what they can get.
Despite a bevy of Christmas newcomers, holdover Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows nailed down second place with about $20.3 million—some of which came from this blog’s readers (don’t deny it; you know who you are). Holmes’ solid showing spoiled Christmas for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which inked a third-place finish and $12.8 million.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked also held its own quite nicely—which likely caused Alvin et al to rub their little tiny paws together and unleash high-pitched maniacal cackles. The CGI rodents squirreled away $12.7 million to land fourth, besting a trio of newcomers.
Steven Spielberg must’ve been especially put out by the Chipmunks‘ strong finish. His computer-animated adventure, The Adventures of Tintin, had to settle for a $9.7 million fifth-place take, while his epic War Horse limped to a seventh-place showing and $7.5 million—almost $2 million behind Matt Damon’s We Bought a Zoo.
It should be noted, though, that War Horse released on Christmas Day—later than most of the week’s contenders. If you count its Monday take as well, War Horse earned a solid $15 million in 48 hours. So maybe Spielberg’s Oscar hopeful still has a little spring in its step.
A colleague of mine thinks that the Christmas weekend was a case of just too many movies going after the same family audience—and families can only see so many movies over the Christmas weekend. If you look at the weekend’s top 11 films, seven were made with at least a sideways eye to the family audience.
Too much of a good thing? Well, not for us. While none of these “family friendly” films are perfect by any means, it’s nice to see that many are pretty good, and a couple—Ghost Protocol and Chipwrecked—are perhaps the cleanest installments in these not-so-family-friendly series. This is the kind of cinematic glut we can live with.
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