Box office: The Hunger Games prequel leads a weekend of (mostly) underperformers

Meanwhile, the latest Trolls movie gets the jump on Disney, and The Marvels has possibly the worst second-weekend drop in superhero-movie history.

Rachel Zegler stars in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

Originality? What’s that?

A prequel, a sequel, and a spin-off based on a fake movie trailer were the top three new movies at the box office this week, while a once-sturdy franchise collapsed at record speed and a holiday-themed musical fell out of the top ten before the holiday season had even really begun.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes—a prequel to the four-part Hunger Games series that wrapped in 2015—topped the chart with an estimated $44 million, which was at the low end of projections and less than half of what the last film opened to eight years ago. Box office trackers had gone into the weekend thinking this film might open somewhere north of $50 million, but in the end, it didn’t.

Second place went to Trolls Band Together, the third film in the animated Trolls series, which met expectations and may have even exceeded them slightly as it landed in second place with $30.6 million—the best opening of any DreamWorks animated film since the pre-Covid times. It was one of just a couple bright spots in a weekend filled with steep falls and underperforming debuts.

Third place was a toss-up between Thanksgiving, a slasher flick based on a fake movie trailer from 2007’s Grindhouse, and The Marvels, the struggling Marvel flick which added to its woes by dropping faster in its second week than any superhero movie of the past quarter-century—and possibly ever. Both films earned an estimated $10.2 million, and we’ll know which one pulled ahead later today.

Besides the Trolls sequel, the other bright spot this week was The Holdovers, which nearly doubled its theatre count and held on to sixth place with $2.7 million, a drop of only 16% from last week. The film, which reunites Paul Giamatti with director Alexander Payne for the first time since 2004’s Sideways, is a strong contender for awards this year, and its staying power bodes well for its chances.

Meanwhile, Journey to Bethlehem, the pop-rock Nativity musical that had one of the lowest openings of any biblical or “faith-based” film last week, earned a mere $950,000 this week and fell out of the top ten altogether. The film has earned just $4.3 million in its first ten days and might not be in theatres at all by Christmas.

Two other noteworthy milestones happened this weekend:

• Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour knocked Indiana Jones out of the year’s top ten.

• Five Nights at Freddy’s, which was already the top-grossing horror film of the past two years in North America, reached that milestone worldwide, too.

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