The Movie Pass: Thanksgiving Feast

Even with this Thanksgiving weekend throwing plenty of new competition in the field, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 held on to the top spot at the box office.

Creed, The Good Dinosaur, and Victor Frankenstein all have their stories to tell this weekend, which we’ll get to, but none of them could challenge the fourth installment in the Hunger Games franchise that saw only a 49% drop and finished with $51.6 million. Even with hitting $440 million world wide, Mockingjay Part 2 is still pacing behind the previous three installments in the franchise, but Lionsgate shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Finishing second was The Good Dinosaur, a movie many thought would come out on top this weekend. The new Pixar film finished with $39.19 million for the weekend and $55.5 million for the five-day haul, giving the studio yet another impressive opening. Pixar and Disney’s strategy to go with two new releases a year will lead to a huge financial gain for them, but it could lead to one “favorite” and one “not-so-favorite” release each year as the marketing team at Disney put everything into Inside Out earlier this year, which I feel impacted The Good Dinosaur’s opening.

Creed Pic

Universal, who has had an awesome 2015, had another smash hit with Creed which came in at #3 with $30.1 million for the weekend and more than $4o million for the five-day holiday period. It appeared that many expected this to finish around the third spot, but numbers seemed better than projected. Along with Creed, early November releases Spectre and The Peanuts Movie remained strong finishing fourth and fifth respectively.

But two movies outside of the top five have stolen the box office spotlight this weekend, and Fox is the one who is at the helm of both. Victor Frankenstein opened to just $2.35 million across more than 2,500 screens giving it the worst opening weekend in box office history (of 2,500 or more screens). Not something Fox can brag about. However, even with that bad news Fox can be pleased that The Martian is continuing to bring in viewers and dollars with an opening in China this weekend that saw better results than both Interstellar and Gravity. Award season push seems inevitable for this one, with Matt Damon and company ready to crash the Academy’s party.

In other news, The British Film Institute released their top Sights and Sounds of 2015 and films such as The Assassin, Carol, and Mad Max: Fury Road were all included. Sight & Sound editor Nick James described The Assassin as “a gorgeous work of revenge, magic and delicate restraint” and also noted the Mad Max sequel as a movie that critics have been waiting on for a long time.

spider-man-new-avenger

During last week’s visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live, Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. let the cat out of the bag that they will be filming together as Captain American and Iron Man in Atlanta soon. The catch? The only Marvel themed movie to be filming in the area any time in the near future is Spider-Man. Everybody remembers this past year it was a big deal that Marvel finally got the rights to use the Spider-Man character cinematically again, and it was made clear that he would make at the very least a brief appearance in Captain America: Civil War, but now it looks like Disney/Marvel’s characters will cross over into the Sony/Marvel stream.

And speaking of Marvel, it appears we might have had a chance to see Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro working on a superhero film together. Supposedly the duo was interested in doing the Doctor Strange movie, but the muddy rumors say anything and everything from it was just an idea among friends, Marvel never knew about it, or it was stopped very early in its tracks. Either way, we don’t get it.

Finally, Cinemablend and IFLS shared some awesome Google Easter Eggs that are related to Star Wars. We suggest you check them out here.

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