The followup to 2009's surprise hit Nativity! enjoys a straightforward delivery, holding off competition from Silver Linings Playbook, Gambit and End of Watch
The winner
It may not have been a hit with the nation's critics, but Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! proved comfortably the top new release at the UK weekend box-office, beating bigger-budget offerings starring Hollywood A-listers Cameron Diaz, Bradley Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal. With an impressive opening of £1.61m, that's more than double the debut of the original Nativity! (£794,000) three years ago. Nativity! went on to accumulate £5.2m during its 2009 run, 6.5 times its opening, thanks to positive word-of-mouth among its target audience of families, and the natural tendency of Christmas-themed movies to sustain and build as the holiday approaches. A similar multiple would deliver a total above £10m for Nativity 2.
Debbie Isitt's original Nativity! flew relatively under the radar – the big festive movie that year was Disney's A Christmas Carol. But a 6 November release date for Robert Zemeckis's performance-capture animation meant many families were looking for fresh festive entertainment by December, creating a great opportunity for Nativity!. This year it's a different scenario, with Nativity 2 getting out a week ahead of the big Hollywood competition, DreamWorks Animation's Rise of the Guardians.
UK distributor eOne reports particularly strong results in Isitt's home town of Coventry, where the Nativity! films' fictional St Bernadette's primary school is located, and across the regions of Gateshead, Basildon, Trafford, Ashford, Sheffield, Didsbury and Milton Keynes. The original Nativity! is meanwhile riding high in the DVD charts, and has now sold a hefty 500,000 copies, despite being available only in limited windows for Christmas 2010, 2011 and again this year.
At Rotten Tomatoes, there is a notable disconnect between top critics (0% fresh), all critics (33% fresh) and site users (100% fresh, from 119 user ratings) on Nativity 2. Among newspaper critics, the London Evening Standard's Charlotte O'Sullivan and the Star on Sunday's Andy Lea are rare balanced voices in a sea of negativity.
The holdover hits
Of course, despite its success, Nativity 2 failed to best the two monster hits that ruled the box office the previous weekend. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 dropped a predictably hefty 66%, and its total of £27.0m compares favourably with the £23.3m achieved by Breaking Dawn – Part 1 at the same stage a year ago. The latest Twilight film is the 15th title to crack £20m at the UK box office so far this year.
Skyfall's drop was much more modest: 32%. After precisely 31 days of play, the Bond flick has grossed a mind-boggling £89.6m, and is clearly on track to overtake Avatar (£94m) in a week or so. The challenge for Skyfall is to grab as much cash as it can before the next franchise blockbuster – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – arrives on 13 December.
The other newbies
Despite some Twitter reports that Silver Linings Playbook was tanking in the regions, David O Russell's indie comedy in fact posted a reasonable opening, with £969,00 over the Friday-Sunday weekend period, and £1.26m including previews. That's significantly less than the debut of Russell's last film, The Fighter, however, which kicked off in February 2011 with £1.66m, and £2.12m including previews. Silver Linings Playbook won the People's Choice award at the Toronto film festival, an honour previously earned by renowned crowdpleasers and future best picture Oscar winners Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech. Both those films achieved enormous multiples of their opening box-office in the UK, and Silver Linings Playbook will need to similarly go the distance in the awards races to repeat the trick. UK distributor Entertainment Films evidently felt the word "Playbook" (an American football reference) was extraneous in the title, with print ads rendering it in tiny letters, and voiceover omitting it altogether for broadcast commercials.
End of Watch, from Training Day scribe David Ayer, proved only middling, with £619,000 from 278 screens. That's a decent number given a reported production budget of $7m, but the combination of Jake Gyllenhaal and cop thriller might have been expected to prove more potent.
The wooden spoon among wide releases is earned by the Coen brothers-scripted Gambit, starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz and Alan Rickman. A remake of a 1966 heist caper, this was always a film that would prove highly execution-dependent, and was never going to be a straightforward sell to audiences unless the souffle cooked just right. Absent much in the way of critical support (the Guardian's own Peter Bradshaw was particularly damning), the highly specific retro tone presented a marketing challenge for backers Momentum Pictures. A disappointing £501,000 over the weekend, and £689,000 including previews, resulted.
The awards race
With less than three months to go the Oscars ceremony, the awards race is beginning to heat up. In addition to Silver Linings Playbook, both Argo and The Master from the current UK top 10 are likely to feature in the nominations, as well as possibly Skyfall. Argo is picking up after a slow start, and has now reached £3.87m. The Master, dropping a troubling 46% on its second weekend of wide play, doesn't seem to be wowing audiences the same way it did critics. Nominations should help push it a fair way beyond the £1m it has so far accrued, just as long as it can hold on to its screens until those announcements occur. Michael Haneke's Amour posted a strong hold, falling just 20%, albeit buoyed by an expansion of screens from 29 to 40.
Competition for upscale viewers came on Saturday night from Dutch violinist and conductor André Rieu's latest Home for Christmas concert, with a live satellite-link Q&A. Grosses are not officially reported, but are rumoured to be in the £200,000 region, from around 145 cinemas.
The future
Overall, the market was a hefty 36% up on the equivalent weekend from 2011, which saw Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and Arthur Christmas continue to dominate.
The coming weekend sees the arrival of DreamWorks Animation's big festive offering Rise of The Guardians, which will be hoping to match the success of Aardman's Arthur Christmas last year (£20.8m), rather than Warner Bros' Happy Feet 2 (£5.6m). It's joined by Mike Newell's new version of Great Expectations, which will test UK audiences' appetite for adaptations of this much-loved classic, arriving less than a year after an admired BBC three-parter. A similarly interesting conundrum is presented by Alex Cross, a revival of the James Patterson character that previously spawned Morgan Freeman films Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls. This new version features Tyler Perry: a huge star in the US, but negligible hitherto over here. Trouble with the Curve benefits from marketable talent including Clint Eastwood, Justin Timberlake and Amy Adams, but faces the hurdle of a baseball-scouting setting. In the more specialised realm, Kill List director Ben Wheatley has grisly comedy Sightseers, and Denmark's Thomas Vinterberg returns with The Hunt.
Top 10 films
1. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, £5,344,598 from 559 sites. Total: £26,979,458
2. Skyfall, £3,809,893 from 550 sites. Total: £89,620,677
3. Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger!, £1,614,675 from 435 sites (New)
4. Silver Linings Playbook, £1,260,979 from 393 sites (New)
5. Gambit, £689,042 from 380 sites (New)
6. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, £637,130 from 504 sites. Total: £21,405,074
7. End of Watch, £618,546 from 278 sites (New)
8. Argo, £495,689 from 290 sites. Total: £3,869,361
9. The Master, £201,844 from 124 sites. Total: £1,002,270
10. Jab Tak Hai Jaan, £198,671 from 64 sites. Total: £1,302,581
Other openers
Lawrence of Arabia, 45 sites, £14,682 (+ £6,284 previews)
The House I Live in, 1 site, £2,275 (+ £2,969 previews)
Starbuck, 4 sites, £2,027 (+ £858 previews)
Cinema Komunisto, 1 site, £926
Ninja Scroll, 10 sites, £348 (+ £2,914 previews)
First, 1 site, £346
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/nov/27/nativity-2-danger-in-the-manger
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