'Hunger Games' feasts on competition with $75.8M

Moviegoing audiences satiated their Hunger pangs this Thanksgiving.

Franchise closer The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 gobbled up the competition for the five-day holiday and topped the box office for the second straight weekend with $75.8 million, according to studio estimates from Rentrak.

There were many in Hollywood who thought its $102.7 million opening — the lowest debut of the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence — was disappointing, according to Rentrak senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. However, the action adventure has racked up $440.7 million worldwide so far and is inching closer to $3 billion total for the series launched in 2012.

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"It’s one of the crown jewels of all-time franchises, in a very short amount of time," Dergarabedian says. "For a franchise that has been in the marketplace for not that long, it has certainly made its mark — and in impressive fashion."

Mockingjay also managed to hold off two strong newcomers. Pixar’s animated The Good Dinosaur, a family-friendly film about a dino and a caveboy, was second with $55.6 million. The prehistoric cartoon met with good reviews (77% approval rating at aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com) and audiences gave it an A at CinemaScore.

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To have two Pixar movies in one calendar year is unusual, and while it didn't match Inside Out's $90.4 million first weekend, Good Dinosaur still had a "very strong" opening, Dergarabedian says. "For families, that was just the perfect option (for Thanksgiving weekend). That was a smart move and a great release date for that movie."

Boxing drama Creed, which featured a returning Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) training Apollo Creed’s son (Michael B. Jordan), made its debut in third with $42.6 million. It also received an A at CinemaScore and was met with critical acclaim (93% at Rotten Tomatoes).

Word of mouth has been outstanding and Dergarabedian has heard anecdotes about audiences cheering during screenings. It's "a real crowd-pleaser," he says. "This is a movie that is really going to get a lot of attention. It’s not just a Rocky movie — it’s much more than that."

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The James Bond film Spectre continued its strong run, finishing fourth with $18.2 million, and Charlie Brown and The Peanuts Movie rounded out the top five with $13.6 million.

The only other wide debut, Victor Frankenstein with James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe, was a disaster. Its $3.4 million total finished a tough week for the movie after it was roughed up by critics (just 23% liked it at Rotten Tomatoes) and garnered a horrific C at CinemaScore.

Thanksgiving was "an unusual time" to release it, says Dergarabedian, though it isn't unprecedented to release a horror film during the holidays: The Exorcist arrived in theaters a day after Christmas in 1973, and the scare-fest Krampus is out Dec. 4.

The Frankenstein reimagining's biggest problem, though, was going up against A-list brands such as Hunger Games, Pixar, Rocky, 007 and Peanuts. "That's another example of a film being so overwhelmed by the options in the marketplace," says Dergarabedian.

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Awards-ready drama The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, earned $185,000 in four theaters — averaging more than $46,000 per screen. And journalism drama Spotlight continued its nationwide expansion, nabbing $5.7 million for five days and pushing its total box office to $12.3 million.

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It wasn't a historic Thanksgiving weekend but still a solid one, according to Dergarabedian. The holiday weekend is important to overall box office for the year, and thus far 2015 is running 4% ahead of 2014 and is neck-and-neck with the record-breaking year of 2013. Plenty of Oscar films and box-office heavyweights are still to come, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens, out Dec. 18.

"We have a short distance to go, but we’re going to make up a lot of ground and add a lot of box-office dollars to the bottom line the next four weeks," Dergarabedian says.

Final numbers are expected Monday.