UK Box Office 8 - 10 March 2013

Oz: The Great And Powerful 3D dominated the box office this weekend with a fantastic debut of £3.7m, the third highest opening of the year so far. Compare this to the opening weekend of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory back in 2005 (£7.9m), Oz will be on release over the upcoming Easter break, giving it a chance to catch up with Charlie’s final box office taking of £37.2m.

In the second slot of the top five, Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects began its run with a positive start, clocking up £905k. Soderbergh’s last thriller, Haywire, debuted with £864k in 2011.

Third place was taken by Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph 3D, with £745k, bringing its cume up to £21.4m. This is now within a hairs breadth of Brave’s £21.5m final cume, expect this to be exceeded within the next week.

Fourth and fifth spot are occupied by Parker and Mama respectively. Parker started its run with £569k and Mama continues its good form with a weekend taking of £536k, bringing it to a cume of £4.5m in its three week release.

Over the pond, Oz has magically pulled in $79.1m. Oz's performance from 3,912 locations is over twice as high as Identity Thief's $34.6 million, and is the strongest debut since The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey started off with $84.6 million in December 2012. It's also the third-highest opening ever for March and the fifth-highest ever during the pre-Summer months. The audience skewed slightly towards females (52%), surprisingly, families only made up 41% of attendance, while couples accounted for 43%.

Jack The Giant Slayer fell 63.8% to $9.8m in the second week of release. Jason Bateman comedy, Identity Thief continues to perform well, falling just 34.7% in the fifth week of release, taking $6.3m, bringing the cume to $116.5m