Weekend Box Office: Twilight takes the biggest bite of a sluggish weekend

By Genevieve Koski | December 5, 2011 | 2:30pm

Aux Features Film

With no new movies opening in wide release this week, the only question going into the traditionally slow holiday-leftovers weekend was whether the vampire-cesarean tutorial video The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 would manage to hang on to the top spot for a third week in the face of well-reviewed family fare like The Muppets and Hugo; and the answer is, “You bet your sparkly corpse-lovin’ ass it did.” Making it the first of the Twilight films to spend three weeks at No. 1 and the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, Breaking Dawn took in $16.9 million (a strong $4,177 per screen), placing it well above No. 2 The Muppets, whose $11.2 million represents the biggest week-two decline in the top 10. Hugo, on the other hand, performed well in its wider second-week release, adding 563 theaters to jump to No. 3 with $7.6 million, with a per-screen average ($4,144) nearly as high as Breaking Dawn’s. Arthur Christmas held steady at No. 4 with $7.4 million, while other, slightly longer-in-the-tooth family films Happy Feet Two and Puss In Boots fell two spots each, to Nos. 5 and 10 respectively.

Once again, things were more interesting on the limited-release side this week, with The Descendents adding theaters and jumping to No. 7 with a $9,059 per-screen average ($5.2 million), and the NC-17 Shame taking in $361,000 in just 10 theaters, thanks to the healthy buzz about star Michael Fassbender’s, uh, performance. Sleeping Beauty barely opened in two theaters, and its meager $10,400 take doesn’t bode particularly well for wider release. As for last week’s debuts, The Artist saw a slight bump as it increased its total theater count to six, while My Week With Marilyn ($1.2 million) and A Dangerous Method ($123,000) took significant per-screen dips but still performed well overall in their limited release.