UK Box Office 26th - 28th October 2012

The film we’ve all been waiting for is finally here and it didn’t disappoint. Skyfall opened with £20.2m, the highest opening weekend of all time for a 2D release (Friday – Sunday) and the second highest of any film, behind 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 3D (£23.7m).  That’s the highest opening for a Bond film, comfortably beating Quantum of Solace (£15.4m) and Casino Royale (£13.4m). It’s also by some distance the highest opening of 2012 beating The Dark Knight Rises (£14.4m) and Avengers Assemble (£13.2m) In fact, Skyfall had taken more than Avengers Assemble’s entire weekend after just Friday and Saturday (£13.5m).

Saturday was Skyfall’s most productive day grossing £7.2m, which is the second biggest Saturday performance of all time behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 3D (£7.6m). However, Harry Potter had the extra ticket price that 3D entails and distributor Sony are proclaiming Skyfall now has the all-time Saturday attendance record (source: Hollywood Reporter). Skyfall also made up a whopping 75.2% of the top 15’s box office and its location average was £34.4k, over £10k more than The Dark Knight Rises’ opening weekend location average (£24.2k).

With Bond being the only major new release this weekend, the rest of the top 15 was made up of familiar titles with Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted 3D putting up a strong performance in the face of the Bond onslaught. The colourful, all-star animation fell just 23% to £2.8m and has an impressive cume of £10.5m. With this week being half-term, expect a strong Monday to Friday too. On its fourth weekend on release, Taken 2 crossed the £20m mark with £1m.  Fourth spot was taken by Paranormal Activity 4, which fell a considerable 54% (when previews are removed) for a cume of £4.3m and it’s clear that it will be comfortably the worst performing entry in the series.

Unsurprisingly, the top 15 total of £26.9m was the best since July 2011 when Harry Potter & DH Pt 2 3D exploded on to the scene. It was up 77% from last weekend and up 61% from the same weekend last year when The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn was released. Expect Skyfall to dominate the box office until the final episode in The Twilight Saga is released on 16^th November.

In the US, on its third week of release, the Ben Affleck directed cracker, Argo, finally topped the box office with $12.4m. After 17 days, Argo has grossed a healthy $60.8m. Another film that went up in the box office was Hotel Transylvania 3D, which leapt from fourth to second place with $9.5m. The Adam Sandler animation has now grossed $130.4m making it Sony Pictures Animation's top animated movie.  Cloud Atlas was the highest new entry in third spot with $9.4m and the audience was 51% men and 77% over 25. Paranormal Activity 4 fell a considerable 70% to $8.7m in its second weekend and now has a cume of $42.6m, which is $10m less than Paranormal Activity 3's opening weekend. Fifth place was a tie between Taken 2 and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, both of which earned $8m.

Source: Rentrak EDI