The winner
Our compact half-term school holidays always concentrate the minds of UK families, offering rich potential for bonanza box-office over a highly compressed time period. And so it has proved with the half-term just ended: from Friday 14 February to Sunday 23 February, The Lego Movie has taken an astonishing £19.72m in just 10 days of play, an average of nearly £2m per day. Add in the previews from the previous weekend, and the film's tally to date rises to a stonking £21.88m. That's more than the lifetime totals of the two lowest-grossing Pixar films – Cars and Cars 2 – and is also ahead of both Kung Fu Panda pictures from DreamWorks Animation. Next in its sights: Madagascar (£22.7m) and Wall-E (£22.9m).
Backers Warners will take particular comfort from the fact that box-office sales for Lego rose at the weekend from the previous frame by 1%. With an amazing £5.98m over the three days, The Lego Movie has achieved the highest second-weekend tally since Iron Man 3 last May. Among animations, Despicable Me 2 scored just under £4m in its second session, and Frozen managed £4.21m. Top second-weekend takings for an animated feature remains Toy Story 3, with £8.11m.
An apt comparison for The Lego Movie might be The Simpsons Movie, since they are both non-sequels featuring a highly familiar brand. The Simpsons stood at £24.19m after two weekends of play, on its way to a £38.7m total. Warners will be hoping that The Lego Movie will show stronger staying power, although the pace of takings will inevitably dip now that kids are back at school.
The runner-up
With family films, there are indeed prizes for coming second. Mr Peabody & Sherman released a week before The Lego Movie, with DreamWorks Animation and its distribution partner Fox evidently hoping to grab some cash before being hit by the tornado of plastic bricks. But the numbers suggest that many families that initially swerved Mr Peabody, opting instead for Lego as their first choice, did finally catch up with the time-travel adventure by the end of the school break. Weekdays last week saw sturdy takings for the film, and then box office for the weekend (£1.70m) represented a healthy 21% rise on the previous frame.
With £10.46m so far, Mr Peabody & Sherman will hardly go down as a DreamWorks Animation smash, but it should soon overtake the lifetime total of the company's last effort, Turbo (£11.94m), and also 2012's Rise of the Guardians (just under £13m).
Moving up three places to rank third, Disney's Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy posted an even stronger rise from the previous frame – up 24% – confirming the trend for families to mop up weaker titles as a school holiday nears its end. (Of course, it's also the case that Friday was a holiday this time around, providing a boost to all the family films that the previous frame didn't offer.) With modest production and marketing costs, and a rich afterlife on ancillary, the latest Tinker Bell will be a profitable film for Disney.
For the first time in many years – and possibly ever – the top three films at the UK box office are all animations. It's not unusual to see animation dominate during school-holiday periods – Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 occupied the two top spots one weekend last July – but you'd expect a film targeting adults to grab at least one of the top three places in the chart.
Rising 54%, Disney's Frozen returns to the top 10, with a total to date of £38.57m. Disney is billing the result as the biggest UK gross ever for an "original animation", by which it means Frozen is not a sequel or a brand-name property, despite being loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. To make the claim stand up, you have to view the original Monsters, Inc. and last year's 3D rerelease as separate amounts: combined, they add up to more than Frozen's tally so far.
The flop
Landing in dismal 13th place, A New York Winter's Tale did not prove enticing to UK audiences, with a gross of just £258,000 from 327 cinemas, and a £788 average. The directorial debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, this adaptation of Mark Helprin novel Winter's Tale would always be a challenge to pull off, and so it proved. Martin Scorsese is reported to once having been interested in adapting it, before deeming it "unfilmable". Goldsman bought some insurance, bolstering star Colin Farrell with Russell Crowe and a cameoing Will Smith, but audiences weren't interested. The poor result means that this week's top 10, highly unusually, features no new releases at all.
The film calendar can suffer becalmed periods: for example, Don 2 led a very weak field of new releases over Christmas weekend 2011, landing at sixth place and the only new entry in the top 10. One weekend in April 2010, Whip It!, in eighth place, was similarly the top 10's single new arrival. In the first session of 2008, Lust, Caution, landing in 10th place, was the top new release. But you'd have to go all the way back to late December 2006 to find a top 10 with no new arrivals. On that occasion, Happy Feet and The Holiday remained in the top two places, ahead of Casino Royale and The Santa Clause 3, with highest-charting new entrants coming from Bhagam Bhag and Flags of Our Fathers in 11th and 12th place.
While new cinema releases failed to engage audiences, the same cannot be said for DVD and Blu-ray: Game of Thrones season three achieved first-week sales of £5.4m last week, apparently making it the fastest selling TV box set of the past decade.
The event
With two films, each around two hours in duration, distributor Curzon Artificial Eye faced a tricky challenge with Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac. How to persuade cinemas to book the films, and audiences to give up a big chunk of their day to view them? The answer to this conundrum was to present them as a one-off double bill on Saturday, with a live-satellite Q&A with cast members. By creating an event around the film, the distributor was able to engage audiences, delivering £143,000 from the single showing at 74 cinemas. Despite only playing once, Nymphomaniac has achieved the biggest opening weekend for a Lars von Trier film, ahead of Melancholia's £132,000.
The challenge now is how to sustain audiences for the two films, which in future will play as separate-ticket items. So far, reports Curzon, 30 cinemas have booked the two Nymphomaniac films from this Friday.
The Baftas bounce
The two big winners at the previous Sunday's Baftas were Gravity (winning six awards including best director) and 12 Years a Slave (best film and actor). Both those titles saw audience numbers spike. Gravity, starting from a relatively low base, more than tripled, moving back up to 11th place with takings of £365,000; its total to date is a strong £31.05m. Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave rose 4%, adding £1.2m for the seven days following its Bafta win, for a tally so far of £17.70m. If it wins best picture at the Oscars this Sunday, £20m is not an impossibility. The Wolf of Wall Street, with no wins, fell 36%, but has now crashed through the £20m barrier, and could be headed for around £23m.
The mystery
Despite no official announcement of a release, a film called Generation Um … showed up as a new entry in the official box-office report, grossing £24 from a single site. The New York-set drama features Keanu Reeves among its cast.
The future
Defying the lack of commercially potent new releases, overall box office is 27% up on the equivalent weekend from 2013, when Mama and Cloud Atlas were the top new arrivals. Wednesday sees The Book Thief's expansion from its single-screen London platform, and on Friday it will be joined by Liam Neeson action-thriller Non-Stop and Kevin Hart in US smash Ride Along. UK distributors often make feeble efforts with films featuring black American casts, but Universal may be encouraged by the growing popularity of Hart to swing for the fences with Ride Along, which has so far grossed $123m in the US.
Top 10 films
1. The Lego Movie £5,978,904 from 552 sites. Total: £21,880,053
2. Mr Peabody & Sherman, £1,698,483 from 529 sites. Total: £10,464,675
3. Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy, £1,207,245 from 423 sites. Total: £3,766,394
4. The Monuments Men, £1,110,264 from 521 sites. Total: £4,078,741
5. RoboCop, £891,443 from 425 sites. Total: £7,036,354
6. The Wolf of Wall Street, £725,047 from 404 sites. Total: £20,963,772
7. 12 Years a Slave, £557,041 from 428 sites. Total: £17,701,103
8. Dallas Buyers Club, £454,319 from 371 sites. Total: £3,336,916
9. Cuban Fury, £422,303 from 370 sites. Total: £1,948,087
10. Frozen, £422,129 from 399 sites. Total: £38,565,069
Other openers
A New York Winter's Tale, £257,634 from 327 sites
Peter Grimes: English National Opera, £145,097 from 278 sites (live event)
Nymphomaniac, £143,282 from 74 sites
Only Lovers Left Alive, £123,989 from 68 sites
Highway, £106,581 from 49 sites
Recep Ivedik 4, £50,716 from 2 sites
Stranger by the Lake, £35,404 from 24 sites
Stalingrad, £33,289 from 50 sites
The Godfather Part II, £9,583 from 3 sites (rerelease)
Ishq Brandy, £7,065 from 6 sites
Aaha Kalyanam, £2,699 from 8 sites
A World Not Ours, £725 from 1 site
Generation Um… £24 from 1 site
Thanks to Rentrak
• The Lego Movie – review
• Mr Peabody & Sherman – review
• More on the UK box office
