New Year Starts With a Big Bang: $76 Million : Movies: Business remains strong in wake of healthy Christmas season. ‘Hook’ continues to lead the pack.

The weather outside may have been frightful, but the movie business continued hot during the weekend. It was a strong encore to the busy week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, which ranked among the best ever.

Film industry estimates place the weekend’s ticket sales at between $76 million and $78 million, down, as expected, from the giant $94 million collected for the weekend between the holidays. But the weekend’s totals were expected to be about $5 million more than the comparable, post-New Year’s weekend a year ago.

All in all, the Christmas-season box office was a welcome treat for the film business, which had been hit harder than anyone expected by the recession, cost squeezes and a period in 1991 when moviegoing was flat, if not downright dismal. The falloff in ticket sales was particularly apparent in the autumn and in the weeks after the July 4th weekend release of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That film, from Carolco Pictures and distributed by TriStar Pictures, was the nation’s leading theatrical attraction in 1991, with $204 million in sales to date.

For the Christmas season, Sony Pictures Entertainment (TriStar and sister studio Columbia Pictures) was the leader among the major film companies in market share.

“Good movies bring out people for other movies,” said TriStar Pictures Chairman Mike Medavoy, whose company also was responsible for the Christmas season’s leading film, Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan fable “Hook,” and for the highly praised biography of gangster Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, “Bugsy.”

Medavoy noted that this Christmas season, the box-office winners were spread out among many titles, as opposed to Christmas 1990, when the action was dominated by “Home Alone,” “Dances With Wolves,” and, to a lessor extent, by “The Godfather Part III.”

Referring to the post-Christmas weekend, he said: “Hence, we ended up with the biggest three-day weekend in the history of movies.” Medavoy cited industry box-office analyst Art Murphy as the source of his observation.

Even if that Dec. 27-29 weekend hadn’t turned out to be a record, there was no doubt that business for the last two weeks has been sizzling. And the weekend just ended benefited from the assortment of popular films continuing in the marketplace.

For the fourth weekend, the box-office leader was “Hook,” commandeering an estimated $11.5 million. “Hook” has ranked No. 1 since it opened and accumulated $82.5 million to date. The rising total is slowly quieting industry skeptics who predicted disaster for the big-budgeted, high-profile movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, when it opened on Dec. 11 to less-than-boffo box office.

Walt Disney Studios also shared heavily in the Christmas-season bonanza, with the animated musical fable “Beauty and Beast,” which opened weeks before “Hook,” having collected about the same total gross: $82.5 million, according to estimates. The movie opened strong, took a dip in business and then rebounded as the school vacation and peak family moviegoing period began.

Disney’s other major holiday entry, “Father of the Bride,” starring Steve Martin in the remake of the venerable 1950 Vincente Minnelli movie, has consistently ranked at the top of film grossers since it opened on Dec. 20. To date it has accumulated $43 million.

Paramount Picture’s “The Addams Family,” based on Charles Addams’ ghoulish New Yorker magazine cartoons and the ‘60s ABC sitcom, looks to be the first film since “Terminator 2” to cross the magic $100-million mark. The movie, of course, had a major head start on the holiday-season competition--opening Nov. 22. As of Sunday, Paramount said the movie has grossed $98.5 million.

Paramount’s other hardy holiday entry continues to be the space adventure “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” also based on a ‘60s TV series that aired originally on NBC. It opened Dec. 6 and has generated $60.5 million so far.

For the just-ended weekend, the estimated rankings are “Hook” in first place with $11.5 million and “Father of the Bride” in second with $9.2 million.

“Beauty and the Beast” and Columbia Pictures’ “The Prince of Tides,” starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, were virtually tied in the early estimates, with about $8.8 million apiece, for third and fourth position. Final box-office figures will be released later today.

In fifth place, the Warner Bros. release of Bruce Willis’ action picture “The Last Boy Scout” did $7.1 million, followed closely by Warner’s “JFK,” Oliver Stone’s assassination-conspiracy movie, with about $7 million. TriStar’s “Bugsy” increased business slightly from the previous weekend, collecting about $5.8 million for seventh position.

Eighth and ninth place were a close call between Paramount’s “Star Trek VI” with $4.7 million and “The Addams Family” with $4.6 million. Also continuing since its Thanksgiving release is Columbia’s “My Girl,” starring “Home Alone’s” Macaulay Culkin. In 10th place, it collected $3.7 million, for a total of $48.7 million to date.