The Twelve Days of Box Office
By Tim Briody
January 1, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

You *will* put me in your next movie.
As the holiday box office gravy train winds down and you recover from your hangover and/or watch a lot of football, here's a quick look at how this year's holiday releases performed on the final day of 2010.

The inevitable finally happened on New Year's Eve, [tm:4948_]True Grit[/tm] earned more than [tm:3856_]Little Fockers[/tm] at the box office. With an $8.3 million (up 74% from last week) Friday, True Grit will now be the Coens' highest earning film of their career by the time you read this.

Predictably, everything is up boatloads from Christmas Eve (an anti-holiday) with the smallest jump belonging to Tron: Legacy (26% to $5 million) and the largest being [tm:5068_]The King's Speech[/tm] (up 712% to $2.5 million since it expanded into 700 theaters).

Little Fockers earned $7.7 million on Friday, which is up 56% from Christmas Eve but is not the $12 million Meet the Fockers earned on New Year's Eve six years ago. The calendar alignment for the two films is just a beautiful thing as it makes the math easy. New Year's Day, being 1) generally good for box office and 2) Saturday is going to be an absolutely outstanding day all around and will lead to solid multipliers for everything even as Sunday dips a bit as people prepare to return to work and school after the holidays. Little Fockers should have a weekend of $26.7 million.

Meanwhile, as mentioned above, True Grit was the number one film on Friday, continuing to pick up steam and awards buzz. Little Fockers is going to make it close, but True Grit should be the top film of the weekend with $27.4 million and shows no sign of slowing down as it heads towards $100 million.

The only other thing of note is that the animated films, Yogi Bear and [tm:1495_]Tangled[/tm], soar 92% and 96% respectively. The only animated thing playing as we turned the calendar to 2005 was The Polar Express, which had been on the decline since Christmas, so it's not a good example. The closest family option was Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which had a rather underwhelming 3.1 multiplier for the weekend (after a 62% increase from Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve). Look for $12.7 million for Yogi Bear and $10.5 million for Tangled.