The final weekend of 2014 saw a familiar name hold the top spot at the weekend box office charts, as the final installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, won the spot for a second straight weekend. The film earned $41.4 million over the weekend, which was enough to beat out newcomers Unbroken and Into the Woods, as the second directorial effort of Angelina Jolie and the Rob Marshall adaptation of the famous Sondheim musical ended up in second and third place, respectively. It was a tight race between the two, as Unbroken finished with $31.7 million, while Into the Woods ended the weekend with $31 million.
Last week’s second and third place finishers, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb and Annie, moved down two notches to make way for the newcomers, as the third entry in the franchise and the musical rounded out the top five. The other new entries in the top ten are the Mark Wahlberg-starring remake The Gambler, which made its entry in seventh place, behind The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1, and the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which followed in eighth place. Despite earning more this weekend than last weekend, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild slipped from sixth place to tenth place, with Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings suffering a similar drop from fourth to ninth.
Among limited releases, there were a number of notable openings, led by Clint Eastwood’s newest feature American Sniper. The film’s $610,000 earning, which came out to a PSA of $152,610, set records in its limited opening, becoming the best one for a Clint Eastwood-directed feature to date, as well as the best Christmas limited opening ever. Another notable film making its first run in limited opening this week is Ava DuVernay’s Selma, as the story of Martin Luther King’s march made $590,000, for a PSA of $31,053. The Marion Cotillard-starring Two Days, One Night, from the Dardenne brothers, also opened in limited release, earning $30,580 in two theatres for a PSA of $15,290, as did the Russian film Leviathan, which took home $15,156 from two theatres as well, making its PSA $7,578.
The other key limited opening of the weekend was the controversial Sony film The Interview, which took in $2.8 million from theatres, earning a PSA of $8,459. The film, however, was also released on VOD in conjunction with theatres, and the latter is where most of the film’s revenue came from, as people decided to stay and home and watch the film to the tune of $15 million, with Sony releasing figures that show the film was rented or bought through non-theatre platforms a total of 2 million times.
The top earners at the US box office for the weekend is as follows:
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies — $41,420,000
- Unbroken — $31,748,000
- Into The Woods — $31,021,000
- Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb — $20,600,000
- Annie — $16,600,000
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 — $10,000,000
- The Gambler — $9,300,000
- The Imitation Game — $7,930,000
- Exodus: Gods and Kings — $6,750,000
- Wild — $5,415,000