Box Office Report: Smaug still king under the mountain

It’s still very much holiday time at the Australian Box Office, with nine of the top ten films grossing over $1 million over the past weekend. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug continues its dominance of the chart and shows that the public’s thirst for films set in Middle-Earth has not waned. In second place, Disney’s Frozen continues its successful run, continuing to position itself as the family movie of the holiday season. Fox’s 3D animated film Walking With Dinosaurs did well to gather over $1.5 million, but is likely losing young audiences to Frozen.

1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner Bros) 6,155,039
2. Frozen (Walt Disney) 4,814,404
3. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Fox) 2,717,686
4. Anchorman 2 (Paramount) 2,272,834
5. Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (Fox) 1,526,896
6. August: Osage County (Roadshow) 1,440,545
7. Philomena (EOne/Hopscotch) 1,318,769
8. American Hustle (Roadshow) 1,244,987
9. The Railway Man (Transmission/Paramount) 1,029,749
10. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Roadshow) 838,248

This week sees the release of Saving Mr. Banks, which depicts Walt Disney’s (Tom Hanks) attempts to obtain the film rights to make Mary Poppins from the original novel’s owner, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson). The film has been popular abroad and has received critical praise, particularly for Thompson’s performance. Also releasing is the adaptation of the best-selling novel The Book Thief starring Geoffrey Rush.

In the US over the past weekend, Frozen amazingly returned to the top of the chart in its sixth weekend. At $19.6 million, it’s the third highest sixth weekend gross in history (behind Avatar and Titanic). The film has now made over $300 million at the US box office and $642 million worldwide and should add a great deal more to that tally by the end of its run. The most prominent new US release, Paranormal Activity spin-off The Marked Ones, debuted at $18.3 million, lower than any opening weekend in the franchise so far.

Saving Mr. Banks and The Book Thief are in cinemas now. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones has its Australian release on January 23.

All figures from The Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia and Box Office Mojo.

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