The Disney animated comedy Big Hero 6, which is loosely based on a Marvel Comic, topped the weekend box office with a potent $56.2 million debut as it nosed out Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which earned an estimated $50 million during its first weekend in theaters.  But the two powerful new debuts sucked most of the oxygen out of the box office, and the total for the top 12 films was down 6.8% from the same weekend last year when Thor: The Dark World opened with $85.7 million.
 
Big Hero 6 looks like another winner for Disney Animation Studios, which is on a winning streak thanks to the strong performances of its two previous productions, Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph.  Directed by Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh), Big Hero 6 earned a solid "A" CinemaScore from audiences, which means that it should continue to do well, though it will receive strong competition from Dreamworks’ The Penguins of Madagascar, which debuts over Thanksgiving.  Big Hero 6 will have to continue to do well to defray its considerable $165 million production cost.
 
The $50 million debuts of Big Hero 6 and Interstellar mark only the fourth time that two films have opened over $50 million during the same weekend.  Not surprisingly, in each case it was an animated film and a live-action film (Monsters University and World War Z, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Prometheus, and Wall-E and Wanted), demonstrating that there is room at the box office for two hits as long as they don’t target the same audience.  In any case it is great to see two non-sequels post such strong debuts on the same weekend.
 
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is the first of the director's films since Insomnia in 2002 that didn’t debut at #1, and some analysts may try to make a big deal out of that fact, but Nolan is to be congratulated for creating a successful film that features scientific debates, hard science space exploration, and family trauma rather than fantasy space combat against alien hordes.  The question is just how successful will Interstellar be?  Like Big Hero 6, Interstellar cost $165 million to produce, so it will have to do big business overseas in order to make any serious coin.  The question is will a serious science fiction film that is not shot in 3-D draw huge crowds overseas?
 
Interstellar attracted a crowd that was gender-balanced (52% male) and older with 75% of the audience over 25.  They gave Nolan’s 169-minute outer space epic a "B+" CinemaScore, which along with the film’s nearly 3-hour running time could limit the film’s success in the domestic market.

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): November 7-9, 2014
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Big Hero 6	$56,200,000	3,761	$14,943	$56,200,000	1
2	Interstellar	$50,000,000	3,561	$14,041	$52,151,000	1
3	Gone Girl	$6,100,000	2,224	$2,743	$145,428,000	6
4	Ouija	$6,017,000	2,680	$2,245	$43,472,000	3
5	St. Vincent	$5,707,000	2,455	$2,325	$27,356,000	5
6	Nightcrawler	$5,512,000	2,766	$1,993	$19,756,000	2
7	Fury	$5,500,000	2,834	$1,941	$69,268,000	4
8	John Wick	$4,075,000	2,152	$1,894	$34,745,000	3
9	Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day	$3,495,000	2,381	$1,468	$59,208,000	5
10	The Book of Life	$2,800,000	2,166	$1,293	$45,215,000	4

There was a huge drop from the #2 film to long-in-the-tooth hit Gone Girl, which finished at #3 in its sixth weekend in theaters as it added $6.1 million driving its domestic total to $145.4 million.  Gone Girl dropped just 28.1 %, and the rest of the films in the top 10 (with the exception of the animated family film The Book of Life, which took it on the chin from Big Hero 6) suffered small percentage declines from previously small totals.  The two big new films accounted for 71% of the dollars earned by the top 12 films. 
 
The one film in the ranks that appears to be making some noise is the Melissa McCarthy/Bill Murray comedy St. Vincent, which looks like the "sleeper comedy hit" of the fall season.  Focus Features opened its Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything in five theaters and it managed to post a $41,400 per venue average.
 
Be sure to check back here next week to see if the heavily-hyped comedy Dumb and Dumber To has enough drawing power to grab the top spot.
 
--Tom Flinn