BOX OFFICE REPORT January 10-12, 2014(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)
TOP 51. Lone Survivor ($38.5 million)2. Frozen ($15.0 million)3. The Wolf of Wall Street ($9.0 million)4. Legend of Hercules ($8.6 million)5. American Hustle ($8.6 million)
After ruling on just two screens, Lone Survivor was the lone winner at the box office, pulling in a mighty impressive $38.5 million. That's Peter Berg's second-best wide opening ever, after 2008's Hancock. It's also the third straight No. 1 wide opening for Mark Wahlberg, a streak that extends further if you overlook the terrible Broken City.
Lone Survivor beat out another strong weekend for Frozen, which is now the fourth highest-grossing movie of 2013, where it will stay. Still, $317 million (and counting) is nothing to sneeze at, and this is a huge success for Disney's in-house animation studio, which arguably had back-to-back years of movies superior to Pixar.
The Wolf of Wall Street continued to defy expectations and negative press to finish third. Leonardo DiCaprio's Golden Globe win "” and possible Oscar nomination "” could keep it around long enough to break even. It still managed to do better in its third week than The Legend of Hercules in its first. No surprise there. That film may fall to fifth place after final results are tallied. Right now it's tied with American Hustle, which finally passed $100 million.
Outside the top 5: - This Weekend's Indie Champ: The best performance by a true limited release was The Invisible Woman, a British film about Charles Dickens' mistress. It made a very mediocre $5,356 on each of its nine screens.
- Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones fell a disastrous but expected 65 percent. Now it's unlikely to even make $40 million.
- Of the three Oscar contenders that expanded this week, only August: Osage County showed serious improvement. The family dramedy with the all-star cast finished at No. 7, while the out-there romantic comedy Her finished at No. 11 and the Coen Brothers' musical Inside Llewyn Davis stayed at No. 15, despite adding 573 more screens.
Next week: It's our first serious competition of the year, as four wide releases battle for box office supremacy. There's the horror film Devil's Due, and the squirrel-centric animated film The Nut Job. I think audiences will avoid both of those. That leaves the Ice Cube-Kevin Hart comedy Ride Along to face off against Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which finds Chris Pine playing Tom Clancy's most famous character. It's hard to know if audiences still care about the character that's been played by the likes of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. The Sum of All Fears did decent business, but that was back in 2002. By all accounts, Shadow Recruit should be a solid action film, but after a decade of Jason Bourne, is that enough anymore? I think audiences are looking for some laughs because there hasn't been a big comedy since, uh, Anchorman 2. So Ride Along becomes a comedy hit on par with Identity Thief, earning $25 million for the weekend.
