As far as holiday “weekends” go, American Thanksgiving has always been a bit of a weird one, box-office-wise. On the one hand, you have lots of people with a decent amount of free time suddenly sitting in their laps; on the other, a ton of cultural messaging that suggests they should be spending said free time in the proximity of their “loved ones.”
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Is it any wonder, then, that the big winner in movie theaters this weekend was the one about being trapped in close quarters with a bunch of people who you are, then, legally mandated to kill? Because despite facing new competition from Ridley Scott and the Disney machine, The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes managed to triumph at the Thanksgiving box office, bringing in more than $23 million so far this weekend. (That’s a notably small second-week drop, after the film opened at $44 million last week, even if it does also incorporate sales from Wednesday and Thursday due to the holiday.)
Those numbers handily beat out both Scott’s Joaquin Phoenix biopic Napoleon, and, perhaps more surprisingly, Disney’s “That’s the sound of us scraping the very bottom of the IP barrel” entry Wish. The latter has earned just about $20.2 million in domestic markets this weekend—which isn’t all that far from what Hunger Games pulled in, the difference being that this is the movie’s first week in theaters. (Napoleon brought in just slightly less, with the Apple-produced film having a long way to go to make back its $200 million budget.)
The most telling thing about all these numbers, though, is how generally teensy they are: Although this year’s Thanksgiving holiday was less dire for theaters than last year’s, it’s still one of those holidays that’s failed to bounce back particularly well after the COVID-19 lockdowns.