UK Box Office 15 - 17 November 2013

Gravity continued its meteoric rise this weekend past, taking a huge £4.8m in the UK box office. With previews removed, that’s a decline of only 14%, this also brings Gravity’s cume to £14.7m after just two weeks on release, an impressive feat for a wholly original sci-fi movie.

Thor: The Dark World continued to hammer away at the box office in second place, taking £1.8m bringing the Norse gods cume to just over £17m, surpassing the first Thor’s entire five week run by £2m.

The Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan drama, Philomena, continued to perform well, taking a cool £1m over the weekend. Philomena has now taken a total of £7.9m to date.

Cormac McCarthy penned thriller, The Counsellor, got off to a steady start, bringing in £815k in its debut week. The Butler rounded out the top five, with £794k, also in its first week of release.

Although the top 10 performed well this week, the total box office was down 15% on last weekend and 51% down on the same weekend last year, when Skyfall ruled the roost.

In the US, Thor rode high in the top spot, taking $38m, bringing its cume to over $146m domestically. That's down 55% from opening, which is steeper than the first Thor's decline (47%), but a slight improvement over Iron Man 3 (58%). More importantly, that drop isn't far off from Skyfall (53%), which opened on the same weekend last year. If Thor can generally keep pace with the Bond movie, a total north of $250 million is within reach.

The Best Man Holiday, starring Terrence Howard and Taye Diggs, took the second spot on its opening weekend, with $30m.

Some way off the top two, Last Vegas, boasting stars such as Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Robert DeNiro, rolled into third place with $8.9m, bringing its cume to just under $47m after three weeks on general release in the US.

Free Birds and Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa took the fourth and fifth spots, bringing in $8.3m and $7.6m respectively.