A Holiday With the ‘Family’ : Thanksgiving No Record but Top 5 Films Gross $82 Million

Recession-minded Americans may not have gone on a spending spree over the Thanksgiving kickoff to the holiday shopping season, but they certainly went to the movies in droves.

Cash registers at shopping mall theaters rang up huge sales for Paramount Pictures’ “The Addams Family,” Columbia Pictures’ “My Girl” and Walt Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” In all, the box-office grosses were a stunning turnaround from the languid performance of movies during the late summer and early autumn.

“The weekend shows that it wasn’t a recession hurting the movie business, but that the product wasn’t compelling. Now there are films to see,” said Paramount’s Motion Picture Group President Barry London.

For the five-day Thanksgiving holiday period--Wednesday through Sunday--the Top 5 films were:

* “The Addams Family,” on 2,100 screens, grossing an estimated $27 million-$28 million. That number, while powerful by industry standards, still falls short of last year’s top-rated comedy “Home Alone” which did $28.6 million the same weekend on only 1,284 screens.

* In second place, “My Girl,” on 2,000 screens, grossing an estimated $17.3 million.

* “Beauty and the Beast,” on 1,118 screens, generating an estimated $16 million.

* Universal Pictures’ “Cape Fear,” in its third weekend, on 1,700 screens, selling $14.1 million worth of tickets.

* In fifth place, and way off the pace of the other leaders, is 20th Century Fox’ “For the Boys,” on 1,307 screens, grossing an estimated $6.7 million.

The resurgence at the national box office, however, was relative only to what has preceded it. Compared to last year in the same period, it didn’t quite measure up.

While the total estimated box-office for the Top 5 films this Thanksgiving weekend was$82 million, according to industry sources, it probably won’t match the $83.7 million for Top 5 for last year. The holiday weekend’s total box office for all films in release, is expected to come in well below last year’s, said John Krier, the owner of Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc., a company that tracks box-office data. (A final tally for the holiday will not be made until sometime today.)

“We’re ecstatic with the performance,” said London, speaking by phone from a Wyoming vacation, about the big numbers for “The Addams Family.” The movie, which opened in first place the previous weekend on Nov. 22, now has a cumulative gross of about $55 million.

“The Addams Family,” based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker ghoulish cartoons and the ‘60s ABC sitcom, stars Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia and Christopher Lloyd. It was purchased unfinished by Paramount for $21 million from financially strapped Orion Pictures Corp. It cost Paramount an additional $9 million to finish, London said.

“The characters are timeless,” said London. And based on the film’s success, he said the studio, is looking to do a sequel.

Besides taking to the kooky Addams family, Americans, apparently, also are continuing their affinity for Macaulay Culkin, the young star of last Christmas season’s box-office champ, “Home Alone.”

This season, Culkin co-stars with Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis and Anna Chlumsky in the sentimental “My Girl,” produced by Imagine Films Entertainment. The story was considered by many in the industry to be a “downer,” since it traces the ill-fated friendship of Chlumsky and Culkin.

Reached Sunday during a vacation on Maui, producer Brian Grazer, said he was surprised by the size of the film’s grosses. “It wasn’t a conceptual movie, like our ‘Kindergarten Cop’ which pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger with a bunch of kids. ‘My Girl’ isn’t the kind of movie you can describe with three sentences.”

Having cost about $14 million to produce, Grazer said the first grosses are particularly satisfying. And, contrary to his initial concerns, the movie’s somber ending isn’t showing up as a negative in audience exit surveys.

“This weekend’s success of all the films, absolutely bodes well for the industry,” Grazer said. “People are dying to see movies . . . that idea is ratified by this weekend when this many people go out to see movies.”

Disney’s critically lauded animated musical “Beauty and the Beast,” came in third place, but according to the studio, it was the biggest weekend ever for an animated movie. Even when only the Friday-Saturday-Sunday gross of about $13 million is figured, the record stands, said Richard Cook, the president of Disney’s Buena Vista Distribution.

Cook said “Beauty” is “playing like a regular movie,” despite the fact that its grosses are “depressed” by children’s ticket prices. “That’s usually the case with animated moves,” Cook said, but he attributed the high numbers for “Beauty” to the fact that it is appealing widely to adults.

The other animated film in the market, “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,” from Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg, held its own in the competitive market, scoring an estimated $5.1 million in ticket sales.

Officials at 20th Century Fox were unavailable on Sunday to discuss the opening of “For the Boys,” which, by the standards of a normal weekend, did reasonably good business with $6.7 million in its first days of wide release. But the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, is not a normal period and the film might have been expected by some in the industry to make a stronger showing. The film, which received mixed reviews, stars Bette Midler and James Caan as two entertainers in a walk down memory lane from World War II to Vietnam.