Box office: Wonka, Poor Things, and Christmas with The Chosen join the top ten

Wonka has one of the biggest openings ever for a non-animated (or non-animated-adjacent) musical, while Christmas with The Chosen has the softest opening yet of that franchise's theatrical releases.

A hugely successful platform release, an okay-performing specialty release, and a financially promising wide release entered the top ten this week.

It’s the holiday season, and life is busy. So let’s keep this one brief.

There were three new entries in the top ten this week, and they represented three very different kinds of film:

• At the top, there was Wonka, a family-friendly big-studio holiday movie that made a slightly better-than-expected $39 million in its first weekend. (It had the 5th-best opening of any film since ‘Barbenheimer’ took off five months ago.)

• At the bottom, there was Poor Things, an R-rated awards contender that cracked the top ten despite playing in only 82 theatres. (Every other film in the top ten this week was playing in at least 1,723 theatres; Wonka was playing in 4,203.)

• And in-between, there was Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night, the latest big-screen spin-off from the popular “faith-based” streaming series The Chosen.

Christmas with The Chosen was a short-term specialty release that has already ended its theatrical run, but the other two films could very well linger on the big screen for a long, long time:

• Wonka may have the sort of broad appeal that brings people back again and again over the holidays, like Jumanji and The Greatest Showman did.

• Poor Things is getting a lot of awards buzz right now—just last week, it got seven nominations from the Golden Globes and 13 from the Critics Choice Awards, which puts it right up there with the likes of Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Oppenheimer—and it’s got almost three more months of potential buzz ahead of it before the Oscars take place March 10. It goes into wide release next week.

I’ll have more to say about the weekend’s top ten below the jump, but, given all the attention I’ve paid to The Chosen’s previous theatrical releases, I figured a few points about this week’s Christmas special were worth highlighting:

• Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night grossed an estimated $2.9 million over the weekend for a total of $4.6 million since opening on Tuesday.

• This is, by a slim margin, the lowest opening of any Chosen release to date…

• …but that’s hardly surprising, as there appears to be very little new footage in the film. I haven’t seen it yet, but I gather it largely consists of re-used music videos from earlier Christmas specials, plus a re-edited version of the two Christmas episodes that were released in 2017 (‘The Shepherd’) and 2021 (‘The Messengers’). So there wasn’t necessarily much of a hook to bring in the fans.

• Also, this is the only Chosen-related theatrical release to come out so close to Christmas Day itself, at the height of the busy pre-Christmas season. The previous Christmas special came out at the beginning of the month two years ago—on the same basic weekend that The Shift took this year—and the Season 3 premiere came out considerably earlier last year, in mid-November.

• Then again, it wouldn’t have surprised me if audiences had turned out in stronger numbers for this film. The Chosen is a big brand, and we’ve seen the “faith-based” audience turn out in droves for re-edited versions of existing TV shows before, e.g. when 2014’s Son of God repackaged the Jesus episodes of 2013’s The Bible and grossed a whopping $59.7 million off of a $29.6 million opening.

• Also, I don’t believe ‘The Shepherd’ has ever had a theatrical release, so that part of this year’s special certainly would have felt new-ish on a big screen.

In any case, this week’s Chosen release was not like the others. The real test of the show’s ongoing theatrical presence will be the release of Season 4 in February: three episodes on the 1st, three more on the 15th, and then the final two on the 29th.

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