Hobbit Stays Atop The US Box Office, With New Movies Struggling

The weekend before Christmas is often fairly quiet, but this year a slew of new movies were released, hoping to line themselves up for the festive period (when they’ll be joined by the likes of Les Miserables and Django Unchained). However none of the new entries could beat the Hobbit, which itself isn’t holding up as well as many had hoped.

It dropped 56% from its first weekend, adding $36.7 million to take its total to $149.9 million. While by no means a disaster (and it’s still doing good business internationally), it not as much as many had expected and significantly lower than the second and third Lord Of The Rings movies had made at this stage.

The Tom Cruise starrer Jack Reacher took $15.6 million to take second spot on the chart, lower than most of the star’s movies, but about what many had expected, especially for the weekend it was release. In third place is Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, which took $12 million to place fourth. Again it could be worse, but many had hoped for more from the sort-of Knocked Up sequel.

Barbra Streisand’s first starring role since 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Guilt Trip, landed with a thud taking $5.3 million to place sixth, despite the presence of Seth Rogen. Middling to bad reviews certainly didn’t help. The 3D re-release of Monster’s Inc. took seventh spot with $5 million, suggesting interest in 3D versions of Disney movies is waning.

The final new nationwide release, Cirque Du Soleil: Worlds Away, placed outside the top 10 at number 11, but it’s difficult to judge exactly how well it did, due to the fact that it only played on 840 screens and had just two showing a day. That means the screenings were fairly well attended, but it’s difficult to judge it against other movies as it was screened in a different way. We’ll be able to tell more in the next few weeks whether the film – which is partway between narrative and concert movie – will be a success.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty also did well in its opening very limited release, taking $410,000 on just five screens, suggesting it will do very well as it expands onto more screens.

Take a look below for the US box office top 10 for the weekend of December 21st-23rd.