Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol may have won the weekend box office, but Hollywood was not celebrating a season filled with box office tidings.
The slow box office trend continued. What is normally a boom for Hollywood, Thanksgiving through Christmas, has been an almost bust. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol earned $26.5 million over the weekend to win the box office battle. Since the film opened, Cruise’s latest film has totaled $59 million and Paramount estimates by Monday morning, the fourth Mission movie will clock in at $72.7 million.
Hardly the totals that one would think would be achieved by the number one film over the holiday weekend.
Last week’s box office champ, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows came in second. Yes, there were a slew of new movies opening this past weekend, and none of them, other than Ghost Protocol, could top last week’s number one movie. Sherlock added another $17.8 million to its total.
Alvin and the Chipmunks’ third film, Chipwrecked, scored third place with $13.3 million and the highly anticipated Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came in fourth with $13 million. Steven Spielberg’s latest directorial effort, The Adventures of Tintin arrived in fifth place with $9.1 million.
Cameron Crowe’s return to narrative storytelling, We Bought a Zoo, mustered only $7.8 in its first weekend of release.
Spielberg’s other film, War Horse, debuted Christmas Day and will see its numbers come more into focus with next week’s box office report.
Normally Hollywood expects to finish the year with a bang. But forecasters are saying that movie going attendance will close the year down 5.3 percent off the same period last year. Even Ghost Protocol, although number one, was off from previous Missions. Impossible films one through three earned $45 to $58 million for its opening weekends as opposed to Ghost Protocol’s $26.5. That is a perfect indication of the problem that Hollywood is having getting people into the seats in 2011.
1. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, $26.5 million
2. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, $17.8 million
3. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, $13.3 million
4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, $13 million
5. The Adventures of Tintin, $9.1 million
6. We Bought a Zoo, $7.8 million
7. New Year's Eve, $3 million
8. Arthur Christmas, $2.7 million
9. Hugo, $2.03 million
10. The Muppets, $2 million