| Date | |
|---|---|
| Author | Mia Blakeney |
Box Office Round-up
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical held on to the top spot with £2.5m, a drop of 39% from last weekend. That takes its total after 10 days in cinemas to £7.8m. One film that makes a good comparison with Matilda is Paddington, a heritage British title that is suitable for all ages, and like Matilda, it opened on the last weekend of November in 2014. After 10 days in cinemas Paddington had grossed £10.4m, but by the end of its run it had climbed to £38m after a bumper Christmas holiday period. Matilda’s distributor Sony Pictures will be hoping that Matilda can prove similarly popular once the holidays kick in.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever stayed in second, falling 44% to £1.5m. That’s the best hold of its run and that’s with a major England game to compete with on Sunday evening. That takes its total after 24 days in cinemas to £29.5m making it the eighth highest grossing 2022 release. In terms of this year’s Marvel titles, it’s still some way behind Thor: Love And Thunder (£37.5m) and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (£42.1m), despite being much better reviews than both.
This week’s highest new entry is the festive action-comedy Violent Night, which opened with £823k. The only other recent-ish film that comes to mind that was a 15-cert Christmas horror-thriller is 2015’s Krampus, which opened with £413k on the first week of December, and finished with £1.2m, so Violent Night should be looking to at least double that total. Comscore’s PostTrak survey saw the film score a 4-star rating, and a 75% Total Positive reaction.
Disney’s Strange World fell to fourth, adding £442k, a drop of 39% from last weekend. That takes its total after 12 days in cinemas to £1.4m. At the same stage of its run last year, Encanto, with a similar release strategy, was on £3.3m so Strange World is sadly lagging some way behind.
The Menu posted a great hold in fifth, falling just 23% to £334k. In fact almost all the upmarket films posted strong holds, potentially a result of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery having left cinemas after its one week stay. The Menu is now up to £2.6m.
Outside of the top five, Aftersun posted the best hold in the top 10 in seventh, falling just 8% to £102k, which takes its total to £680k, and that was before it picked up the Best British Independent Film at the BIFAs on Sunday night.
The box office is down 33% from last weekend and down 2% from the same weekend last year.
Next Weekend
The Silent Twins is a drama starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence as June and Jennifer Gibbons, real-life identical twins who grew up in Wales and became known as "the silent twins" because of their refusal to communicate with anyone but each other. It won a major acting award at the BIFAs on Sunday.
The Buzz
Cocaine Bear is a title that sells itself. Directed by Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 2), it’s a comedy-thriller about an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens who converge in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine. Inspired by an incredible (and sad) true story, the trailer launched on Wednesday and has been generating a huge amount of buzz since. It’s already had a think piece in The Guardian and the trailer on the official @cocainebear twitter account has already had 20m views. Along with M3GAN in January, this looks like being one of the most talked about, and anticipated films for 16-34s in Q1 and you can see just what the bear gets up to from 24 February.
Across The Pond
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever topped the box office for the fourth successive weekend, adding $17.6m, a drop of 61% from last weekend. That takes its total to $394m and it will soon surpass Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($411m) to become the year’s second-biggest film in North America. Violent Night opened in second with a solid $13.3m and it should be around for the next few weeks. Strange World in third added $4.9m, a chunky drop of 60% from last weekend, which takes its total to $18.9m. The Menu came in fourth with $3.6m, which takes its total to $24.7m. Devotion completed the top five, adding $2.8m for a new total of $13.8m.