Last time Roland Emmerich made a movie it was the commercial and critical misfire 10,000 BC. But the Independence Day director's return to what he does best - blowing stuff up - has paid big financial dividends. End-of-the-world disaster movie 2012 opened in the UK with takings of £6.5m. That's the third-biggest three-day weekend of 2009, behind the summer's Harry Potter and Transformer movies.The success, which echoes similar box-office bonanzas for the title across the globe, will have a big impact on the way distributors approach the release calendar. Big movies including Bond, Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings have released in November and December. But those were character-driven franchise properties with built-in audiences. A movie like 2012 - whose big selling point is CGI featuring awesome destruction - is much more akin to the kind of fare that clogs multiplexes in the summer. And if such a film can be so successfully released outside of summer, it will embolden studios to spread their expensive goodies more evenly throughout the year. Of course this may or may not be a good thing: big, expensive dumb action 365 days a year.
Joining 2012 in the winners enclosure is Disney animation A Christmas Carol. The Robert Zemeckis motion-capture film opened the previous weekend with a slightly lacklustre £1.9m; commentators wondered whether early November was simply too early to release a festive family film. Another week closer to Christmas has clearly been beneficial: defying received wisdom that a film's box-office revenues always decline each week, the Dickens tale's takings went <up> this weekend, by 31%. A Christmas Carol took £2.5m this time around, for a 10-day total of £5.5m. With more than five weeks to go until Christmas, the weekend increase augurs well for a continuing successful run.
Coming in third with £1.3m (including Wednesday and Thursday previews of £314,000), Michael Caine vigilante thriller Harry Brown is a bona fide local hit. Box-office watchers had not been sure that Caine fans would turn out for this title; and the younger audience that supported disaffected-teen drama Adulthood is notoriously fickle. Jack O'Connell from TV's Skins and Adulthood's Ben Drew both feature in the drug-dealing gang that provokes Caine's character's ire: casting choices that may have helped sell Harry Brown to older teens and twentysomethings.
One of the biggest fallers in the chart is Michael Jackson's This Is It, which slumped from second to seventh place, with takings down 65% on the previous weekend. Sony had initially announced a finite two-week run for the film, which has evidently had the trick of encouraging fans to go out and see it quickly. The distributor then extended the run - yes, they fibbed! - and it is now in its third week of play. The big drop shows that the vast majority of the film's total audience has now already seen it.
UK Top 10 (up to November 15)
1. 2012, £6.49m (New)
2. A Christmas Carol, £2.5m (2 weeks in chart - Total: £5.47m )
3. Harry Brown, £1.27m (New)
4. Up, £986k (6 weeks in chart - Total £32.75m)
5. The Men Who Stare At Goats, £796k (2 weeks in chart - Total: £2.76m)
6. Fantastic Mr Fox, £676k (4 weeks in chart - Total: £7.71m
7. Michael Jackson's This Is It, £475k (3 weeks in chart - Total: £9.3m)
8. The Fourth Kind, £428k (2 weeks in chart - Total: £1.8m)
9. An Education, £202k (3 weeks in chart - Total: £1.37m)
10. Jennifer's Body, £182k (2 weeks in chart - Total: £1.2m)
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