The post-Thanksgiving lull is in full effect at the box office, as we enter the no man’s land between the raft of titles earning big money across the holiday period and the late-year releases that look poised to gobble up hundreds of millions of dollars now that the turkeys are in the rear-view mirror.
Encanto, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and House of Gucci all posted strong totals last weekend, but we’re most definitely in a holding pattern until potential heavy hitters Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Matrix Resurrections and The King’s Man arrive in a couple of weeks.
As a result, the acclaimed Disney animation is set to repeat at the top of the charts, but a projected $12.3 million haul isn’t really anything to write home about. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is poised to finish second again, but takings are estimated to drop below $10 million in just its third frame, although it’ll become just the tenth movie to pass $100 million domestic by the end of Sunday.
House of Gucci will stay in third, so it’s all much the same as last week. That spells even more bad news for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which has already suffered the ignominy of flopping, and fans seeking their fix of R-rated genre fare are already looking ahead to the respective returns of Keanu Reeves’ Neo and the Kingsman agency.