Weekend Box Office: A Cold Christmas
Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 3:12PM By Ben Miller
Traditionally seen as one of the big box office weekends of the year, the Christmas box office was hampered by the devestating cold weather. Avatar: The Way of Water cruised to another easy box office championship but the entire weekend only made slightly north of $80 million.
| Weekend Box Office (actuals) Dec 23rd-25th 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = Recommended |
|
| WIDE (OVER 800 SCREENS) | LIMITED / PLATFORM |
 AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER |
 THE WHALE |
| 1 ★ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER $63.3 (cum. $261) 4202 screens |
1 🔺 THE WHALE $1.0 (cum. $2.5) 603 screens |
| 2 🔺 PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH $12.4 (cum. $18.5) *NEW* 4099 screens |
2 EMPIRE OF LIGHT $86k (cum. $682k) 350 screens |
| 3 🔺 WHITNEY HOUSTON: I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY $4.7 *NEW* 3625 screnes |
3 🔺 ★ WOMEN TALKING $40k *NEW* 8 screens |
| 4 🔺 BABYLON $3.6 *NEW* 3343 screens |
4 ★ EO $38k (cum. $217k) 36 screens |
|
5 VIOLENT NIGHT $3.5 (cum. $41.9) 2562 screens |
5 ★ THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN $39k (cum. $8.8) 80 screens |
|
6 BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER $3.5 (cum. $426.1) 2250 screens |
6 🔺★ CORSAGE $32k *NEW* 2 screens |
 THE FABELMANS |
 CORSAGE |
|
7 ★ THE FABELMANS $745k (cum. $9.9) 1122 screens |
7 THE MEAN ONE $26k (cum. $540k) 51 screens |
|
8 ★ THE MENU $678k (cum. $33.8) 840 screens |
8 🔺★ LIVING $22k *NEW* 3 screens |
|
9 STRANGE WORLD $413k (cum. $35.6) 1390 screens |
9 ★ TÁR $17k (cum. $5.5) 36 screens |
|
Only nine films are in wide release (>800 screens) |
10 ★ ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED $10k (cum. $251k) 25 screens |
The Way of Water is still expected to have legs, with an 11-day total of $261 million. For the weekend, it's down 53%, but there isn't much in the way of competition. The three new wide releases landed with a thud. The exceptional Puss in Boots: The Last Wish managed only $12.5 million while the less than enthusiastic reviews of the terribly titled Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody barely made an impact. The big news is the crash and burn of Damien Chazelle's Oscar-hopeful Babylon, which barely made over $1,000 per screen in a very wide release. Not the best look for its award chances.
On the platform/limited side, things were much sunnier for Darren Aronofsky's The Whale. It's the only platform release to reach over $1 million since Glass Onion did it for the week it was out during Thanksgiving. Elsewhere, Oscar hopefuls Women Talking, Corsage, and Living all did respectable business on a combined 13 screens between them. Corsage won the best per-screen average with over $16k per screen.
NEXT WEEK - There isn't really such thing as a New Year's box office weekend. Studios make sure their awards hopefuls get qualifying releases, but nothing comes out wide. That doesn't change this week. The only notable release is the Tom Hanks-starring remake A Man Called Otto, but that doesn't go wide until later in January. It's slim pickings out there.
What did you see this weekend? Lots of Christmas movies for me, including Spirited, White Christmas, A Christmas Story, and The Holiday. I was able to rewatch Top Gun: Maverick with the family as well as the delightfully dark The Menu.
Avatar The Way of Water, Corsage, The Whale, box office
Reader Comments (14)
I saw AVATAR and BABYLON over the holiday weekend, really enjoyed them both. I guess it wasn't unexpected that James Cameron hit another one out of the park. People who bet against him are making a fool's wager. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much I loved BABYLON. Some of my friends said it was terrible, and the trailer promised a loud, overwrought, annoying film, but some of the most annoying stuff in the trailer were cut from the final film, which plays really well. A lot of my cineaste friends are screaming about the historical inaccuracies. Funny how they never complain about the historical inaccuracies in, say THE DEER HUNTER, LINCOLN, or MARIE ANTOINETTE. But if it's a film about, well, the film world they scream bloody murder.
One friend pointed out some minor inaccuracies in BEING THE RICARDOS (posters on the wall in the RKO studio head's office were anachronistic). I said, talk to an entomologist. They're always complaining that the sounds of insects (crickets chirping on the soundtrack, and so forth) are almost never accurate. There will be a scene in a suburb in Ohio and the so-called cricket sounds are insects that only exist in South America or whatever. He looked at me and said, "that's not the same." But you know what? It kind of is.
I think much of the hostility toward BLONDE and BABYLON is that they're challenging the myths of Hollywood and showing the wages paid to fuel the dream factory.
A couple of short films by women on MUBI to finish up my subscription for the year (which I will renew on January 1st) to finish off my 52 Films by Women pledge as I've reached that goal and a couple of re-watches in Mickey's Christmas Carol and A Bad Moms Christmas as the latter should be in the list of great Xmas films.
Damien Chazelle continues to be dismissed... WHY?! His last two films have only upped the ante on his technical prowess and conceptual ambition, showcasing dazzling spectacle that other filmmakers could only dream of!
I saw 2 movies in the theatres before the bad weather hit.
“Empire of Light” in which Olivia Colman is asked to play every emotion under the sun. And she does. Of course she does. Beautifully.
“Decision To Leave”. Interesting and evocative. I felt I lost a lot of the allusions, how Chinese and Koreans typically view the other nationality, what the lead actress actually sounded like speaking her second language. I felt the script had a lot of subtlety and subtext that I missed. I really liked the sections where the detective re-created how the crimes must have gone down. Worth a rewatch.
At home I watched the miniseries “Treason” with Charlie Cox, “Witcher: Origins” with Michelle Yeoh, “The Glass Onion” again, 1/2 hour episodes of the comedy series “Ghosts” both the original British version and the American remake, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” with Dan Stevens and Christopher Plummer.
In 1978 real rage dominated the discussions of the historical accuracy of The Deer Hunter. Reporters who were in Vietnam and covered the conflict challenged the scenes of Russian roulette, claiming no evidence existed that Americans were ever subjected to such torture.
Though Michael Camino originally said he wrote the screenplay from personal experience and Singapore newspaper articles, investigative reporters suggested the script was drawn from a spec script about gamblers who played Russian roulette in Las Vegas.
Producer Jane Fonda of Coming Home, The Deer Hunter’s most likely competitor for Best Picture, was quite vocal in the media about the historical inaccuracy. She boasted she did not see the film.
Star of The Deer Hunter Robert De Niro defended the film, "Whether [the film's vision of the war] actually happened or not, it's something you could imagine very easily happening. Maybe it did. I don't know. All's fair in love and war."
Noted film critic Roger Ebert calmed the brouhaha of the historical accuracy of the Russian roulette sequence with his take, "It is the organizing symbol of the film: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole.”
McGill -- i also saw EMPIRE OF LIGHT and loved Olivia's performance. I guess i'm not surprised at the negative reviews but I thought it was quite good. People are very harsh on dramas. they never get cut any slack the way genre films do.
Dan H -- anachronisms always provoke such strange responses. people's tolerance for them varies so wildly. I admit i was one of the people annoyed by Babylon's constant anachronisms. I love anachronisms if i can see a reason or if they feel consistent with the POV but i guess it annoys me a lot when anachronisms are just there and not there simultaneously and with little rhyme or reason.
I saw
I Love Trouble 1994 Julia Roberts comedy/thriller
Top Gun Maverick entertaining if predictible.
The Fog one of Carpenter's best
Prey for the Devil another ok possession movie very Exorcist-lite
Carry on Matron later series entry still funny
Tina 2019 doc on a legend
I was getting really worried about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (which, give or take GDT's Pinocchio, is the best animated film of 2022) when I saw its first weekend gross, but it made almost $14 million between Monday and Tuesday and it's domestic total is up to $32.8 million (with a worldwide total of $75.2 million in its first 7 days), and with no other major animated film coming out for at least another month, it should have the space to have some decent legs.
I just saw Babylon and enjoyed it, but I do think this is one of those times when Damien Chazelle's earnestness winds up working against him. He loves movies, that's very clear, and I do admire that he's one of those artists that is willing to examine the work that goes into something that can become a part of history (it's why I love First Man so much), as well as the price you pay to commit to it (which we saw in Whiplash), but this film portrays Hollywood in such a putrid, toxic light, that when he starts romanticizing about the movies, it starts to feel like he didn't think through the implications of what he was saying. It looks gorgeous, it has strong performances and it feels genuine, but I do feel the adoration blinded him on this one.
I also saw A Man Called Otto (which was released this Sunday in Mexico, I'm guessing because Mariana Treviño is in the cast), which was exactly what I needed to watch at the time I watched it: a sweet, very predictable film where Tom Hanks plays a cranky old man who mellows out (and I have seen A Man Called Ove, I had very similar opinions of that one).
@Finbar McBride I remember the furore over THE DEAR HUNTER, but it wasn't really within present, as far as I remember, within any of the cineaste communities. Critics and film fanatics didn't care. It was mainly political leftists who rightly saw the film as demonizing the Vietnamese. It seems the only thing cineasts get upset about is historical inaccuracies in films about the cinema. I'm sure there are some that would rub me the wrong way. For instance I'm glad that FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN didn't demonize Freddie Francis, when they showed Joan Collins hitting rock bottom and appearing in his film, TROG. He was a better than average horror director (who also won two Oscars as a cinematographer) who was also kind of hitting rock bottom making that film. They didn't make him out to be great auteur, but they rightly didn't depict him as a hack. So, this is all to say we all have our own emotional investments in aspects of film history, but I really didn't see the poster of STROMBOLI on the wall in BEING THE RICARDOS a few years before it was made as proof that Aaron Sorkin is unforgivably cavalier about the truth. It was clearly chosen to show us the kind of film Ball wanted to be making for the studio--prestige films with a strong female protagonist--but that she would never be given a chance to make. So, you know, poetic license. As for the ones in BABYON, I noticed a few, but was just so caught up in the great filmmaking that they didn't bother me. (There were probably others I didn't notice, because early Hollywood isn't my area of speciality when it comes to films.) On the other hand, every time the New York Times, publishes and article about Swedish cinema, I'm immediately firing off an email alerting them to all the factual errors. Their obit for Bibi Andersson had four significant errors in it. And they're a NEWSPAPER.
"For instance I'm glad that FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN didn't demonize Freddie Francis, when they showed Joan COLLINS hitting rock bottom and appearing in his film, TROG"
@Dan H, somewhere 6 ft down under, Miss Joan CRAWFORD is turning!! lol
I found some of the responses to BABYLON quite bizarre. Complaining about historical liberties in a movie about old hollywood is baffling when old hollywood did that plenty for the sake of drama.
The Whitney movie is so bad. Why do all these movies look so terrible?
@Claran912 "Miss Joan CRAWFORD is turning!! lol"
Eeek. Well, that's whats I get for having the NY Times fact check my post before I sent it.
It was a good weekend for whales, considering they dominated both wide and limited releases!
AVTAR THE WAY OF WATER WILL BE THE FIRST MOVIE TO CROSS 3bn$