Dropping an OK 45% in its second frame, final Hobbit film Battle of the Five Armies stands at a healthy £20.35m after 10 days of play. That’s just ahead of Desolation of Smaug, which had reached £20.04m at the same stage of its run. Smaug went on to experience an exceptionally strong third session (going up 2% from the second weekend), so the pressure is now on for Five Armies to manage a similar feat this coming weekend. Five Armies is only the fourth film this year to crack £20m after two weekends’ play. The others are The Lego Movie, The Inbetweeners 2 and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. As you can see from the top 25 chart below, which lists the biggest-grossing films of 2014, these previous titles occupy three of the top four places. By the time it has run its course at UK cinemas, it’s reasonable to expect Five Armies will be the top hit of the year, based on the performance of the previous Hobbit movies. Dropping just 14%, Paddington has delivered another strong session at the UK box office, and now stands at £18.12m.
With kids on holiday for Christmas, Paddington and other family films should continue to play robustly – and not just at weekends. Paddington was able to resist the challenge of the PG-rated Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which landed in third place with £1.85m. That number compares very disappointingly with predecessor Night at the Museum 2, which debuted in May 2009 with £4.16m, including £883,000 in previews. The original Night at the Museum kicked off in December 2006 with £7.69m, including £3.70m in previews. Both films ended up in a similar place – between £20m and £21m – and Fox now has its work cut out to get the third instalment to that level. Such an outcome looks distinctly unlikely. Annie, which was originally set to arrive in cinemas on Boxing Day, in fact started playing on Saturday – presumably to diminish the impact of the online leak of the film. It is technically in previews, so its takings have not been included in official reports, and will all be added next time.
Only one film in the top 10 saw a rise in takings from the previous frame, and that was Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?! Box office rose 16%, for a total to date of £6.37m. At the same stage, the weekend before Christmas, predecessor Danger in the Manger had reached £7.37m. It’s not unusual to see Christmas-themed films rise in box office as the holiday approaches. However, Get Santa failed to match the Nativity performance, dropping 19%. Both titles are likely to see audiences dwindling rapidly after Boxing Day. Admissions figures for November – measuring the number of tickets sold rather than box office value – are now in, and they show a dip on the same month in 2013. Overall for the first 11 months of the year, admissions are trailing 2013 levels by 6%. Cinemas would need to sell 25m tickets in December – roughly double what they sold in November – to make up the shortfall on 2013 and end the year level. The year hasn’t been plagued by huge money-losing flops – no John Carter, for example – but it has lacked the occasional giant hit that can really help the overall picture.
In 2012, Skyfall grossed more than £100m, while the same year saw Marvel’s Avengers Assemble with £52m and The Dark Knight Rises with £56m. So far, no 2014 release has cracked even £35m (see chart below), although that picture should change when Five Armies completes its run. If Five Armies falls short of £40m, that would make 2014 the first year with no £40m-plus hit since 1998. The Desolation of Smaug managed £42.92m, so Five Armies will need to pretty much match the pace of its predecessor to ensure this doesn’t happen. Next year should be a different story, with Avengers: Age of Ultron, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Spectre all very likely to be £50m-plus, and further big numbers expected from the likes of Jurassic World and Fifty Shades of Grey. Despite the decent holds for Five Armies and Paddington, grosses were overall 14% down on the equivalent frame from 2013, when The Desolation of Smaug performed robustly, Frozen delivered another exceptional result and Anchorman 2 achieved a nice opening.
Cinema owners are now pinning their hopes on the final frame of 2014, which will see the official opening of Annie, plus Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, Tim Burton’s Big Eyes and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken. Whatever happens in the final weekend, 2014 will go down as a year that most distributors and exhibitors will want to forget. 1. The Lego Movie, £34.34m 2. The Inbetweeners 2, £33.39m 3. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, £32.72m 4. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, £28.60m 5. Guardians of the Galaxy, £28.54m 6. X-Men: Days of Future Past, £27.13m 7. How to Train Your Dragon 2, £25.07m 8. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, £24.02m 9. The Wolf of Wall Street, £22.70m 11. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, £20.35m* 13. 12 Years a Slave, £20.03m 14. Transformers: Age of Extinction, £19.56m 16. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, £19.35m 17. 22 Jump Street, £18.61m 22. Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, £14.72m
24. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, £13.91m 1. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, £5,409,312 from 605 sites. 2. Paddington, £2,513,675 from 588 sites. 3. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, £1,851,424 from 511 sites (new) 4. Dumb and Dumber To, £1,807,059 from 460 sites (new) 5. Penguins of Madagascar, £723,939 from 506 sites. 6. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, £673,220 from 419 sites. 7. PK, £649,812 from 132 sites (new) 8. Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?!, £443,173 from 430 sites. 9. The Imitation Game, £370,324 from 303 sites. 10. Get Santa, £366,310 from 458 sites. The Nutcracker: Bolshoi Ballet, £293,192 from 195 sites (event) Kon Tiki, £23,446 from 33 sites Guys and Dolls, £5,570 from three sites (rerelease) Rigoletto: Vienna State Opera, £5,406 from six sites (event) Silenced, £84 from one siteI am done with Lego. And no, it's not because I stepped on a brick in the middle of the night last night, suffering what can only be described as the worst pain in the world, although yes, that's a permanent source of rage for every parent, really.
No, I'm done with Lego because that sacred cow of millions of geeks who grew up happily constructing elaborate vehicles, castles, cities, and imaginary lands, is no longer the Lego of our childhood. It's time to face the hard truth: Lego is evil now. On the one hand, the story of Lego's resurgence in the past few years is a remarkable tale of innovation and canny survivalism. The patents on Lego's brick design began expiring in the early 2000s; the original patent expired in 2011, and despite many attempts by Lego to get its patents extended indefinitely and then to trademark the design, the company was eventually forced to admit that innovation was its only road to continued success. Enter the new saga. Lego 2: The Licensing. It started with "Lego: Star Wars," of course, and the library of licensed Lego goodness now includes, to name just a few, Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Batman, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, Toy Story, Cars, The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Super Heroes (including figures from Marvel and DC Universe), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and even, heaven help us
, a set based on the new "Lone Ranger" movie. Here's a list, if you're in the mood. Things really got genius in 2011, when Lego went ahead and created its own original series, Lego Ninjago. The premise is brilliant, from a merchandising and sales perspective. There are six main characters, five of them ninjas who have to go through various stages of training and ninja accomplishments -- meaning multiple permutations of minifigures from just the primary cast. Then there's a different set of villains for each season, each set of villains has its own vehicles, weaponry, and mechs, as do the ninjas, and virtually no single minifigure is available for sale all by its little lonesome -- only as part of a set that ranges from $10 if you're lucky to $100 and up if you're the parent of a fanatical 3-, 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old child. Now there's "Chima," a show that aired once, near as I can tell, but which has still spawned a million minifigs. Plus, many of the themes also now have companion character encyclopedias, which are little more than catalogs for greedy, brand-obsessed children.
The hype around the must-have toys is so intense it's even led to full-on Lego fraud rings, and I myself bought a sketchy standalone minifigure on eBay that arrived wrapped in tissue in a Ziploc bag, just to avoid spending $30 or $40 on yet another ridiculous "set." My biggest complaint about the licensed sets, other than their always increasing cost, is that they're basically the antithesis of the Lego model: where I remember building and learning to build with the Lego blocks of my youth, these new sets simply require children to follow somewhere between 100 and 300 steps to build a very specific, one-time use vehicle or environs. Then, 2 to 7 hours later, they're done, moved on to the next shiny branded toy. Yes, of course, you can deconstruct the sets and build something else out of the blocks, but many of these new pieces are specialty parts that hardly fit anywhere else: wings, bolts, circular attachments, pointy triangle blocks. They're less interchangeable than they've ever been.
Plus, with all the emphasis on characters, the minifigures are the focus of most of the attention: kids will beg their parents to buy a $40 set, mine the minifigures, and toss the rest into a separately sold, branded storage bin. And do not get me started on the Lego for girls sets that have started to spring up in the last year or so. After all, once Lego is no longer even remotely about creativity, problem solving, or imaginative thought, why not go all the way toward pandering to ludicrous gender stereotypes and producing a bunch of pink crap. I'm hardly the first to complain about Lego moving to a licensing model that costs a lot, turns our kids into brand slaves, and dampens their creativity -- but what really gets my goat is that the company is simultaneously trying to cling to its creative roots by releasing imagination-oriented sets and products for adults. Take the newest release from the Lego Architecture Studio line, which, wonder of wonders, consists of a box of bricks, no instructions, and "a world of endless creative possibilities."