Audiences flocked to movie theaters over an extended Christmas weekend, bringing ticket sales to $161 million, but the domestic box-office total for the year to date remains well behind the prepandemic level.
The fact that Christmas fell on Monday, plus the Christmas Day openings of major films The Color Purple, The Boys in the Boat, and Ferrari, gave theaters $66.4 million in ticket sales on top of the $95 million they had raked in on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, according to preliminary estimates from
Comscore,
a global media-analytics company. And those numbers don’t include sales of popcorn and other goodies.
The top-grossing movie was Warner Bros. Pictures’ Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, with $27.7 million over the weekend, and $38.3 million including Monday. The action adventure story, a sequel to the 2018 superhero movie, again stars Jason Momoa as the title character.
Aquaman also performed well internationally, with a total cumulative take of $118.5 million, including $33.7 million in China, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
In second place was Warner Bros.’ Wonka, with $28.4 million over the four-day weekend, and nearly $85.9 million in cumulative domestic box office since its Dec. 14 opening, Comscore said. The musical fantasy, a prequel to the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, stars Timothée Chalamet and features Hugh Grant as an indignant Oompa Loompa.
Wonka is winning over audiences worldwide, with $263.5 million globally, per BoxOfficeMojo.
Warner Bros.’ The Color Purple, a new version of the 1985 film based on the novel by Alice Walker, was the top film on Christmas Day and the third-best-selling movie over the weekend, with $18.1 million in domestic ticket sales. Amazon MGM Studios’ The Boys in the Boat, the George Clooney-directed film about the University of Washington’s rowing team’s quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, brought in another $5.7 million during its Christmas opening.
Last year, Walt Disney’s Avatar: The Way of Water hauled in $63.3 million over Christmas weekend.
Year to date, domestic box-office sales, covering the U.S. and Canada, had totaled more than $8.8 billion through Christmas Day, Comscore said. That is 20.5% more than last year’s $7.3 billion, but 20% less than the $11.0 billion movie theaters raked in before the pandemic, in 2019.
Movie studios put 95 films in wide release this year, compared with 112 in 2019. So-called wide releases are films that open in or eventually expand to 2,000 or more theaters.
“This is an incredibly exciting time to be a moviegoer and despite the box office over the Christmas weekend being down compared to pre-2020 levels, audiences are greeted at the multiplex by a unique and unprecedented selection of titles from all genres, films of budgets big and small, and a notable increase in interest in international titles that have been making their mark at the multiplex this year,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Barron’s.
According to Comscore, the 10 films with the highest gross ticket sales in North America so far this year were as follows:
- Warner Bros. Pictures’ Barbie, the highest-grossing movie solo-directed by a woman, earned $636 million.
- Comcast -owned Universal Pictures’ The Super Mario Bros. Movie scored $575 million.
- Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hauled in $381 million.
- Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 earned $359 million.
- Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer, which opened the same day as Barbie, took in $326 million.
- Disney’s The Little Mermaid hauled in $298 million.
- Disney’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania raked in $214 million.
- Lions Gate Entertainment’s John Wick: Chapter 4 earned $187 million.
- Angel Studios’ Sound of Freedom earned $184 million.
- Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, distributed by AMC Theaters, scored $179 million.
Worldwide, the top grossing 2023 movies are Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, each with $1.4 billion, followed by Oppenheimer with $952.0 million, and Guardians of the Galaxy, with $845.6 million, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
“If 2023 was a year of hard lessons learned, hopefully 2024 and beyond will reflect studios and creatives taking stock of what the audience is saying through their presence or absence at the movie theater this year” and use that to determine what films to release in coming years, Dergarabedian said.
Films opening in early 2024 include: Paramount Pictures’ Mean Girls, on Jan. 12; Paramount’s Bob Marley: One Love, on Feb. 14; Warner Bros. Discovery’s Dune: Part Two, on March 1; Universal Pictures’ Kung Fu Panda 4, March 8; and Sony Pictures’ Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, March 29.
Write to Janet H. Cho at [email protected]
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