Box Office: THE GRINCH Steals First Place!

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Illumination, the animation wing of Universal, has a knack for making relatively low budget computer animated films that rake in a ton of cash. The Minions, and Despicable Me films all carried budgets at or below $80 million, and more than tripled that in box office returns. This holiday season Illumination released a new CG animated version of Dr Seuss’ timeless holiday classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas and carried on that tradition of moderately budgeted, high grossing family films. Dr Seuss’ The Grinch easily took the number one spot this weekend with $66 million. It was projected to bring in about $50 million; so, once again, the top film out performed expectations.

Falling one spot to number two is the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. The crowd pleasing flick fell only 39.6% to end its second weekend with $30.8 million. Rhapsody is now at $100, with plenty more to come. Expect it to finish over $150.

The J.J. Abrams produced Overlord opened quietly with $10.1 million. That’s actually a decent start for a horror film in November, but this type of movie usually carries a lower budget than the $38 million this cost. While that’s not a high budget by today’s standards, its probably not going to do more than break even in theatres.

Dropping like a stone from second to fourth is Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. The holiday fantasy flick plummeted 53% for a second weekend take of $9.5 million. That brings its total domestic to $35.5 million. With a budget of $120 million, Disney definitely took a hit with this one.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story opened at number five with only $8 million. I think this franchise is officially over. The books are still bestsellers, so I’m guessing someone, probably a streaming outlet, will wait a couple years, take it back to the beginning, and reboot it as a TV series.

In other box office news, Sony’s Venom finally opened in China. The symbiote took in an astounding $111 million making it the second highest Chinese opening for a comic book movie, behind only the $188 million of Avengers: Infinity War. This brings Venom‘s total international take to $673.5 million! It will easily surpass the $700 million mark worldwide and may even break $800 million when all is said and done.

Next week the big release should be Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald. I don’t think audiences really took to the first film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; however, the dedicated Harry Potter fans (myself included) should turn out to easily help Beasts claim the top spot.

Here’s the full top ten. As always, worldwide numbers include the domestic takes, so if you need to know what the international numbers are you’ll have to break out the calculator.

Rank	Title	Weekend Take	Domestic Total	Worldwide Total
1.	Dr Seuss’ The Grinch	$66,000,000	$66,000,000	$78, 700,000
2.	Bohemian Rhapsody	$30,850,000	$100,010,548	$285,273,150
3.	Overlord	$10,100,000	$10,100,000	$19,300,000
4.	The Nutcracker and the Four Realms	$9,565,000	$35,256,534	$96,656,534
5.	Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story	$8,015,000	$8,015,000	$16,315,000
6.	A Star is Born	$8,010,000	$178,020,388	$322,800,000
7	Nobody’s Fool	$6,540,000	$24,276,108	$24,541,108
8.	Venom	$4,850,000	$206,233,603	$673,533,603
9.	Halloween	$3,840,000	$156,810,845	$245,510,645
10.	The Hate U Give	$2,070,000	$26,705,883	$28,830,030