Box Office Weekend: Hobbit Stays On Top

While it may have had a comparatively rough ride (and remains the lowest-earning of the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings movies), The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies proved Hobbits can still be surprising, earning an estimated $41.4 million, losing a little less than a quarter of the opening weekend audience and raking in $168.5 million in domestic earnings (and a hefty $573.6 million in worldwide take, a success by any measure). Speaking of success, the final weekend of 2014 proved to be one of the better weekends of the year as well, as second and third-place finishers Unbroken and Into the Woods brought in an estimated $31.7 million and estimated $31 million, respectively, though both films are being elusive about their production costs.

Meanwhile, the weekend even spelled better luck for most of the top ten. A Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb made an estimated $20.6 million and gave the struggling film a shot in the arm while Annie, making an estimated $16.6 million, did not pick up quite as much but weathered its critical storms quite well. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 also pushed up in its bid to come close to (but now looking less likely to dethrone) the domestic success of Guardians of the Galaxy with an estimated $10 million for the weekend.

In fact, as The Imitation Game slid up a few slots as it entered wide release with an estimated $7.9 million and Wild picked up an estimated $5.4 million in the tenth-place slot, only two films faltered over the weekend. The first was The Gambler, the Mark Wahlberg remake of the 1974 James Caan vehicle, which opened to an estimated $9.3 million…along with mixed critical reception and a fair distance before making back its $25 million budget. The second is Exodus: Gods and Kings, which has managed to match its budget thanks to overseas revenue, but remains a massive domestic bomb, its estimated $6.8 million not only one of two revenue drops in the top ten this week, but also only $52.5 million in domestic earnings.

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Seth Paul

When not failing to write novels and screenplays, box-office guru Seth writes humorous comedy tracks for films under the name "The One Man Band" that can be found at Rifftrax.com. Although, he has recently succeeded in writing the novella "Jack Alan and the Case of the Not-Exactly Rocket Scientists," available as an eBook on Amazon. He is also the English voice of Zak in "Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space."

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