Box office: Studio movies sink, niche movies rise in a surprisingly successful post-Thanksgiving weekend

A concert film, a couple of foreign action and disaster films, and a "faith-based" sci-fi film helped make up for some seriously struggling big-studio movies.

Gojira comes for the American box office in Godzilla Minus One.

The first weekend after the American Thanksgiving is usually a pretty slow one at the box office, and that was… sort of true, but sort of not, this year.

It was sort of true, because some of the biggest Hollywood movies lost their audiences at record-setting rates this week. But also not quite true, because this turned out to be one of the biggest post-Thanksgiving weekends ever, thanks to an unprecedented flood of new films that came from outside of the studio system.

Let’s start with the would-be Hollywood blockbusters:

• The major studios released no new films at all this week.

  • That’s not uncommon, as the major studios have always tended to let their Thanksgiving movies coast through the post-Thanksgiving weekend.

• The problem is, this year’s Thanksgiving movies are struggling.

  • Disney’s Wish had the steepest second-weekend drop of any Disney Thanksgiving family film ever. It even fell behind DreamWorks’ Trolls Band Together, which has been in theatres one week longer.

  • Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which was produced by Apple and distributed by Sony, had one of the worst second-weekend drops of his career.

  • Disney’s The Marvels, which came out three weeks ago, fell out of the top ten altogether this week. Every other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of the past dozen years has stayed in the top ten for at least six weeks.

And what made up for the studios’ shortfall?

• Five new films, all reflecting a wide range of genres and niches.

  • The concert movie: Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, $21 million, #1.

  • The Japanese disaster flick: Godzilla Minus One, $11 million, #3.

  • The Indian action flick: Animal, $6.1 million, #7.

  • The “faith-based” indie sci-fi movie: The Shift, $4.4 million, #8.

  • The dialogue-free action film: Silent Night, $3 million, #9.

    • This Lionsgate release is the closest thing to a new “major” movie this week, but the no-dialogue concept makes it unconventional in its own way, and the fact that it’s directed by John Woo—it’s his first American film in 20 years—gives it some quasi-international cred, too.

• As far as I can tell, it is completely unprecedented to see five new movies in the top ten the weekend after the American Thanksgiving. I’ve scrolled through every post-Thanksgiving weekend since 1982 and I can’t find one that had more than three such films; most have one or two such films, many have none.

The end result? At a time when the major studios were absent or floundering more than usual, movie theatres recorded their biggest post-Thanksgiving weekend since 2018—yes, even bigger than the post-Thanksgiving weekend of 2019, when Frozen II led the way and virtually no one was even thinking about Covid yet.

What’s more, this was one of the ten biggest post-Thanksgiving weekends of all time. We won’t know exactly how high this week ranks on the chart until the final figures are in later today, but as of this writing, with just 30 films reporting their figures, it’s in ninth place, and it wouldn’t take much to nudge it up to eighth.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: