“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2” raked in $76 million in ticket sales during the five-day holiday period running from Wednesday through Sunday in the United States, box office trackers Exhibitor Relations and Rentrak said.
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Also opening this weekend, Creed took in $29.63 million. While this is one of the lowest debuts for a Pixar film, it’s actually the fourth best opening of all-time for a film releasing Thanksgiving weekend.
Coming in second place was “The Good Dinosaur“, Walt Disney Co.’s new Pixar offering. The Pixar/Disney release, boasting an A CinemaScore, earned $39.2 million for the three-day weekend. That movie scored $90.4 million on its opening weekend in June, making it the largest opening ever for a totally original film.
Pixar Animation studio executives and lead story supervisors had earlier presented to lifestyle writers and bloggers how an animated film like “The Good Dinosaur” springs to life from drawings, sketches and storyboards via a tour of the studios located in Emeryville, California. The film stars Michael B. Jordan as the son of Apollo Creed and Sylvester Stallone returned to play an older Rocky Balboa.
Mockingjay 2 opened to $101 million. Look for the final Katniss flick to break $200M on Monday and finish its North American run with about $300M. After being projected to make a low in retrospect $30 million in five days, word of mouth, Rocky nostalgia and more bumped it up to $42.6 million and counting. It also brought in $62 million internationally to bring its global total to $440.7 million.
Still the result was high enough to claim the top spot, even over a major new release like Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur.
Spectre fell to fourth this weekend, grossing $12.89 million.
Rounding out the top five were “Spectre” and the “Peanuts” movie.
Oscar victor Eddie Redmayne saw a good start for his attempt at winning back-to-back Best Actor trophies as The Danish Girl bowed to an estimated $185,000 from four theaters for a strong $46,250 average.
No records were broken this Thanksgiving weekend, but that’s more of a sign of a crowded slate than the health of the box office, Dergarabedian said.
The drops are measured in its second weekend.
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According to studio surveys, the film did well attracting its target audience of older women: 58 percent of the audience was female, and 67 percent was older than 40.
