Why Thanksgiving-weekend movies aren’t doing well this year
This year’s Thanksgiving-weekend lineup has been a mixed bag, to say the least. In fact, they don’t seem to be doing too good lately: We’ve already had the first film not to make our Top 10 since 2005 in the wake of the release of the disastrous ‘Black Nativity.’ And now, a second one after the week in which ‘The Lone Ranger’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales’ made their debuts, has been released in limited release, the only ‘Star Wars’ picture to be released on this date, ‘Star Trek Into Darkness.’
The Thanksgiving-weekend lineups thus far this year could be characterized as one big ‘not-the-best-of-2010’ list.
Before the first one, two other films had made our Top 10 list for the month of Thanksgiving. Those were ‘The Best Man Holiday,’ which also had been moved ahead of ‘Laggies’ in 2006 for no other reason than to move it ahead of ‘The Best Man,’ and ‘The Fighter,’ which had been moved down from our Top 10 in 2010 to make room for ‘The Lone Ranger.’
Now we’ve got a film that has been moved up two places since then, to become our No. 3 film, ‘The Lone Ranger,’ and we’re down to our first ‘Star Wars’ picture to have ever released on our big-screen schedule on Thanksgiving weekend, ‘Star Trek Into Darkness.’
It’s hard to know exactly what we’re seeing here, but I did take a quick look at the movie’s opening weekend to see whether it was going to take the cake – and it would have beaten out ‘The Best Man’ if it weren’t for ‘The Lone Ranger.’
On average, opening weekend box office takes are pretty bad. ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ was about 20% of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales’s take at the box office, while it was about 25% of ‘Laggies’ and a bit less than ‘Pirates.’
That said, the movie did
