As far as vacation “weekends” go, American Thanksgiving has at all times been a little bit of a bizarre one, box-office-wise. On the one hand, you may have numerous folks with an honest quantity of free time instantly sitting of their laps; on the opposite, a ton of cultural messaging that means they need to be spending stated free time within the proximity of their “family members.”
Is it any surprise, then, that the massive winner in film theaters this weekend was the one about being trapped in shut quarters with a bunch of people that you’re, then, legally mandated to kill? Because regardless of going through new competitors from Ridley Scott and the Disney machine, The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes managed to triumph on the Thanksgiving field workplace, bringing in additional than $23 million thus far this weekend. (That’s a notably small second-week drop, after the movie opened at $44 million final week, even when it does additionally incorporate gross sales from Wednesday and Thursday as a result of vacation.)
Those numbers handily beat out each Scott’s Joaquin Phoenix biopic Napoleon, and, maybe extra surprisingly, Disney’s “That’s the sound of us scraping the very backside of the IP barrel” entry Wish. The latter has earned nearly $20.2 million in home markets this weekend—which isn’t all that removed from what Hunger Games pulled in, the distinction being that that is the film’s first week in theaters. (Napoleon introduced in simply barely much less, with the Apple-produced movie having a lengthy option to go to make again its $200 million finances.)
The most telling factor about all these numbers, although, is how typically teensy they’re: Although this 12 months’s Thanksgiving vacation was much less dire for theaters than final 12 months’s, it’s nonetheless a kind of holidays that’s did not bounce again significantly effectively after the COVID-19 lockdowns.
