Box office

Ralph breaks Grinch's spirit, holds on to No. 1

Wood Harris (left) stars as Tony “Little Duke” Burton and Michael B. Jordan (center) plays Adonis Creed in MGM’s boxing drama Creed II. It landed in third place at last weekend’s box office and made about $16.8 million.
Wood Harris (left) stars as Tony “Little Duke” Burton and Michael B. Jordan (center) plays Adonis Creed in MGM’s boxing drama Creed II. It landed in third place at last weekend’s box office and made about $16.8 million.

NEW YORK -- On a typically sleepy post-Thanksgiving weekend in movie theaters, leftovers led the box office and Disney's Ralph Breaks the Internet repeated as No. 1 with $25.8 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Wreck-It Ralph sequel dropped steeply (54 percent) after nearly setting a Thanksgiving record last weekend. But with only one new film in wide release, nothing came close to Ralph Breaks the Internet, which sends John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman's video-game characters into cyberspace. In 11 days of release, the $175 million film has cleared $207 million worldwide.

Still going strong in its fourth week of release, Universal's The Grinch came in second with $17.7 million in ticket sales. The Grinch, the Illumination animated production with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Christmas curmudgeon, surpassed $200 million domestically and edged in front of last week's No. 2 film, the Rocky sequel Creed II. Like Ralph Breaks the Internet, MGM's boxing drama also slid sizably after a big holiday opening and landed in third place, declining 53 percent. Creed II, with Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed, took in $16.8 million in its second weekend. It has thus far grossed $81.2 million on a $50 million budget.

At No.4, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald added $11.2 million in its third week. Rounding out the top five, Fox's Bohemian Rhapsody added $8.1 million in its fifth week.

New over the weekend, Sony's The Possession of Hannah Grace landed at No. 7 with $6.5 million, on the higher end of analyst projections of $3 million to $7 million. The film, which stars Pretty Little Liars actress Shay Mitchell as a morgue worker who comes across a possessed corpse, was panned by both audiences and critics with a C-minus rating on CinemaScore and a 17 percent "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Crazy Rich Asians, Warner Bros.' breakout summer hit, was a dud in China. Warner Bros. said the acclaimed romantic comedy, which earned $173 million domestically, debuted in China with just $1.2 million. John M. Chu's Singapore-set film, which opened Aug. 14 in the U.S., took months to secure a release date in China, a delay some have attributed to the film's depiction of extremely wealthy Chinese Singaporeans.

Crazy Rich Asians was a hit at the Singapore box office, but, like most comedies, it hasn't been as much a sensation abroad as it was in the U.S.; it's earned $64 million overseas. The film's performance in China, though, is potentially worrisome for Warner Bros. Its planned sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, aims to better capitalize on the world's second largest film market.

One film that didn't dip much on the weekend was Universal's Green Book, which grossed $3.9 million on 1,065 screens, dropping 29 percent. The uplifting road trip drama set in 1962, starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, has struggled to match Oscar buzz with box office. But last week, Green Book was named best film of the year by the National Board of Review, and Universal is hoping it holds strongly in the coming weeks.

Netflix premiered Andy Serkis' Mowgli, a retelling of the classic Rudyard Kipling tale, in a small number of theaters a week before it begins streaming on the site. The film, originally produced by Warner Bros. before being sold to Netflix, earned a 50 percent "rotten' rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Netflix does not report box office grosses for its films.

Orion opened Anna and the Apocalypse in five locations with $50,000, a per-screen average of $10,000. It earned an 84 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Also in limited release, Fox Searchlight's The Favourite added 30 locations in its second weekend (for a total of 34) and $1.1 million in ticket sales, a per-screen average of $32,500 and a cumulative $1.7 million.

Things seem to be clicking for The Favourite, a sharp-edged comedic drama directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and heralded by critics for tour-de-force performances by Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. The Favourite took in roughly $1.1 million from only 34 theaters over the weekend, for a per-screen average of $32,500. That figure is in line with early results for Lady Bird (A24), which went on to collect $79 million worldwide last year, and surpasses the initial ticket sales for The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight), which took in nearly $200 million worldwide and won the 2018 Oscar for best picture.

"A younger audience is finding The Favourite along with older cinephiles," Frank Rodriguez, head of distribution for Fox Searchlight, said Sunday. "It's performing really well in art houses but also in hipper, cooler houses like the Alamos and the Regal Union Square." Next weekend, The Favourite will seek to capitalize on hoped-for Golden Globe nominations by expanding into 100 theaters.

Free Solo became the year's fourth documentary to cross $10 million. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's documentary about Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of Yosemite National Park's El Capitan rock face, has joined the most lucrative batch of documentaries ever released in a year: Three Identical Strangers, RBG and Won't You Be My Neighbor?

MovieStyle on 12/07/2018

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