Weekend Box Office: Rise of the Guardians stumbles as most everything else (Life of Pi, Red Dawn, etc.) flies.

As I wrote yesterday, this weekend was a perfect example of the issue with reporting cumulative box office as if it means anything.  Yes it was the biggest Thanksgiving weekend on record ($295 million total over the five days), but such a thing tends to happen when you have three strong holdovers and three relatively strong new releases in one frame.  As always, it's the movies.  More importantly, total weekend box office success is only important if your film is among the ones doing well.  

Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians basically flopped.  There's really no nice way to say it.  In five days, the $145 million animated film earned $32.6 million while earning just $24 million over Fri-Sun.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is the lowest opening weekend, by a very large margin, for Dreamworks Animation since Flushed Away back in Fall 2006 ($18 million).  Even the film's five-day total ($32.6 million) puts it as the lowest comparative three-day opening weekend since 2006 and their 17th lowest total out of 25 films.  The reasoning for this actually pretty simple.  The film didn't look very visually appealing, the marketing didn't promise anything beyond a painfully generic story (both sadly true about the film itself), and the campaign was based upon the idea that having three holiday icons that everyone knew (Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny) and two that were far less well-known in pop culture (Jack Frost and the Sand Man) engaging in a riff on the first X-Men picture was automatically appealing. It wasn't, and with Lincoln and Skyfall winning out as consensus choices for large families, and with Life of Pi  coming out far stronger than expected as a family film choice, plus the still-strong Wreck It Ralph ($149 million thus far, making a go at Tarzan's $171 million finish), Rise of the Guardians just couldn't muscle out of the pack.

Reason 4,325 why cumulative box office is a stupid statistic...

If you've read this site for any length of time, you've heard me claim about the constant reporting of what's basically called cumulative box office.  Cumulative box office is basically the total weekend box office of all films currently in theaters.  It's the kind of statistic that presumes that box office is a team sport, rather than a solo enterprise.  It's the stat that led to the whole 'great movie-going slump' of 2005, wherein various box office pundits screamed that movie going was doomed because the cumulative weekends were down from the same respective weekends in 2004, never mind that different movies were being released in summer 2005 compared to summer 2004.  Since then we've had any number of 'slumps!', usually during periods when we had more smaller, lower-budget films instead of non-stop tent poles every weekend.  This weekend  we're going to hear a lot of talk about how this Thanksgiving is the biggest Thanksgiving ever by around $20 million.  That's terrific news for the industry I suppose, especially if you're the part of the industry releasing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 or Skyfall.  But if you're the part of the industry that's releasing Rise of the Guardians, you're probably not having a very good Thanksgiving.