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And so we’ve come to the end of the road. Still I can’t let go. Yes, the Twelve Days of Box Office has finally reached day twelve, which presumably features a bunch of lords-a-leaping and a fruitarian partridge. Wait, does the partridge actually eat the fruit in that song? wHATEver.

Yes, the December holidays are over. Yesterday’s box office was the final one, New Year’s Day. As always, the last hurrah was a great one. Every movie in wide release increased from New Year’s Eve, a phenomenon that is largely explained by the celebratory nature of that particular evening. Be honest. Have you sobered yet? If you worked on any Christmas Day release other than The Wolf of Wall Street, I sure hope not for your sake. In fact, feel free to drink every time I say million. The twelve step program can start next week. Today is a good day for more self-pity binge-drinking.

If you have been paying attention the last few days, you know what the headline will be. Yes, Frozen finished in first place again yesterday. That marked its fourth win in a row and fifth overall during the Twelve Days of Box Office. Technically, it is not the winner of the holiday season as the movie in second place (you’ll never guess which one) won six out of eleven days so far. What I will note is that due to this calendar configuration, today’s box office is effectively Day Twelve while Friday is Day Thirteen aka Overtime, and Frozen will win each of these as well. That makes the score 7-6 heading into the weekend. So, even if we do not score the bout relative to expectations, I still think Frozen will win if we include Thursday and the weekend. Then again, I am a member of the Disney Vacation Club so all of the Tolkien fanatics writing their daily complaints that I am biased may be on to something.

Anyway, Frozen grossed another $8.7 million (DRINK!) domestically yesterday, bringing its grand total to $271.8 million. With that turn of events, the animated movie with the killer soundtrack (FYI: I actually prefer Demi Lovato’s version of Let It Go to Idina Menzel’s) surpassed another Disney property, Monsters University, to become the fourth biggest domestic release of 2013. Next up is Man of Steel with $291 million, a total that Frozen should blow by either this weekend or soon afterward.

While I could spend an hour hurling superlatives on Frozen, let’s focus on the core concept for this particular series of columns. Frozen’s $8.7 million is a total better than the movie managed on any day from December 15th to December 25th. Yes, its New Year’s Day total surpassed its Christmas Day number. During the twelve days leading up to the start of the Twelve Days of box office, Frozen grossed $60.5 million. During the first eleven days of the Big Twelve (no, not the football conference where defense is a foreign concept), Frozen garnered $86.6 million. The end of year holiday season effectively ignores the known behavior about titles in release. Films appreciate in value rather than depreciate.

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