In spite of a massive snowstorm that sprawled across the middle of the country and the fact that the weekend after Thanksgiving is considered a sort of cinematic "Death Valley," Hollywood has some reason to be a bit cheerful about a 17% increase in ticket revenue versus the same weekend last year.  Disney’s animated feature Frozen topped the box office in its second weekend of release as it earned $31.6 million to end the two-week reign of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which brought in an estimated $27 million.  The top two films accounted for 62% of the weekend’s total box office as the crime thriller Out of the Furnace tripped coming out of the gate.  The two top holdovers are largely responsible for the hefty increase in ticket sales over last year when, in a perfect illustration of how bad this weekend has been for the studios, Skyfall, then in its fifth weekend of release, managed to top the charts with just over $10 million.
 
Frozen appears to have the potential to be a big winner for Disney animation.  The pricy ($150 million) animated feature has earned $134.2 million here in North America and $55.9 million overseas for a worldwide total of $190.2 million.  With no major animated competition in the next few weeks, Frozen should be a strong box office performer through the end of the year.
 
Meanwhile The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which dropped 63.6% as it earned $27 million, brought its domestic total to $336.7 million.  The second Hunger Games film has earned almost exactly the same amount overseas, giving it a worldwide total of $673.4 million, which is very close to the original Hunger Games’ final total of $$691.2 million.  While Catching Fire may not be able to match the first film’s domestic total of $408 million, overseas the sequel has already surpassed the first film’s $283.2 million.  It also appears unlikely that Catching Fire will manage to eclipse the billion dollar mark, but it most assuredly will post a considerable net gain over the first film.

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): December 6-8, 2013
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Frozen	$31,641,000	3,742	$8,456	$134,278,000	3
2	The Hunger Games: Catching Fire	$27,000,000	4,163	$6,486	$336,665,000	3
3	Out of the Furnace	$5,300,000	2,101	$2,523	$5,327,000	1
4	Thor: The Dark World	$4,740,000	3,074	$1,542	$193,640,000	5
5	Delivery Man	$3,775,000	2,905	$1,299	$24,799,000	3
6	Homefront	$3,384,000	2,570	$1,317	$15,284,000	2
7	The Book Thief	$2,700,000	1,316	$2,052	$12,075,000	5
8	The Best Man Holiday	$2,673,000	1,577	$1,695	$67,239,000	4
9	Philomena	$2,282,000	835	$2,733	$8,255,000	3
10	Dallas Buyers Club	$1,459,000	734	$1,988	$12,411,000	6

This week Catching Fire displaced Man of Steel as the third-highest grossing film of 2013 so far.  Next up is Despicable Me at $367.1 million, though it appears increasingly unlikely that Catching Fire can catch Iron Man 3’s leading year-to-date total of $409 million.
 
Frozen and Catching Fire were really the only major players at the box office this weekend.  Third place went to Out of the Furnace, a gritty steel town revenge thriller, that opened in 2101 theaters but earned just $5.3 million for a miserable $2,523 per-venue average.  The $22 million Out of the Furnace features an excellent cast headed by Christian Bale, but its downbeat storyline didn’t register with audiences, and the film’s mixed critical reaction (just 52% positive on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes) doesn’t bode well for its future prospects.  A largely male (60%) opening weekend audience gave Out of the Furnace a nasty "C+" CinemaScore, which does inspire much confidence either.
 
Marvel Studio’s Thor: The Dark World slipped to #4 in its fifth weekend in theaters.  The Dark World dropped 57.2% as it added $4.7 million to bring its domestic total to $193.6 million.   The Thor sequel has already eclipsed the first Thor movie’s domestic total of $181 million, and appears poised to finish its domestic run just over the $200 million mark.  Overseas The Dark World is doing even better, having already earned $416.7 million (or 68.3 % of its total).  So Thor: The Dark World has already earned nearly 27% more than its predecessor, which is considerably less of an "Avengers Bump" than Iron Man 3, which earned 49% more than Iron Man 2, was able to achieve.  Also Iron Man 3 also earned 66.3% of its worldwide total overseas, so the box office performances of the last two Marvel Studios projects indicate that a substantial majority of Marvel movie fans live outside the U.S. and Canada.
 
Fifth place went to Vince Vaughan’s comedy/drama Delivery Man, which has demonstrated solid "legs" after a very shaky debut.  The $26 million production still has a long way to go to become profitable, but comedies tend to hang around a bit longer than action movies or horror films.
 
The Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a saga of the Greenwich Village folk scene with a lead character loosely based on folk blues singer Dave Van Ronk, opened in 4 theaters and did big business, but may not go wide for a couple of more weeks.
 
Be sure to stop back next week as the second half of the 2013 holiday movie season starts off with a bang as Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens wide, while other high profile films such as the “Tom Hanks as Walt Disney” film Saving Mr. Banks and David O. Russell’s American Hustle will get more limited debuts.