Box-Office Record for ‘93, Despite Slow Holiday Sales : Movies: More than $5 billion in receipts will exceed previous high from 1989. ‘Jurassic Park’ figures heavily.

Thanks to a bountiful summer of moviegoing--and no thanks to a weak Thanksgiving and Christmas crop of movies--the film industry is about to set a record for annual box-office grosses.

At some point today, according to box-office analyst A. D. Murphy of the Hollywood Reporter, the cumulative gross for 1993 will equal the $5.03 billion in ticket sales established in 1989--the year the Motion Picture Assn. of America pegs as the all-time high.

As of late last week, another box-office tracking service, Exhibitor Relations Co., of Beverly Hills was showing 1993 to be running about 2% ahead of 1989.

This year’s gains can be credited to the summer blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” which has grossed $338 million domestically so far.

The increase in box-office gross totals, of course, also reflects a rise in ticket prices, which the MPAA says has increased from an average of $4.45 each in 1989 to about $5.09 this year. Those figures, however, are disputed by some exhibition industry leaders, who believe that the average ticket price has not gone up nearly as much, due to the proliferation and popularity of half-price matinees and low-cost, second-run theaters.

Whatever the gross turns out to be between now and the final day of the box-office year on Jan. 6, a record is a given. Due to school vacations and the New Year’s holiday, this week and the coming holiday weekend have the potential to create one of the biggest weeks for moviegoing in 1993. So far, however, the performances of all but a few holiday movies in national release--the comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire” and the thriller “The Pelican Brief” in particular--have been unspectacular.

The most interesting action has come in the limited releases of such dramatic films as “Schindler’s List,” “Philadelphia,” “The Piano,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”

In final numbers for the Christmas weekend reported on Monday, “The Pelican Brief,” a thriller starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, continued to head the top-grossing movies with $11.1 million for the three-day weekend. It has a total gross of $36 million.

“Mrs. Doubtfire,” the comedy starring Robin Williams and Sally Fields, remains the season’s one sure big hit, with a weekend gross of $9.3 million and a gross to date of $89.1 million.

There were three wide Christmas Day openings: “Tombstone” with Kurt Russell ($6.5 million for two days); “Grumpy Old Men,” with Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine ($3.9 million), and the animated “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” ($1.2 million). They were hampered, as were all films, by the way Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fell--on Friday and Saturday, normally the big moviegoing nights.

Despite the initial big numbers for the AIDS drama “Philadelphia” and the Holocaust-themed “Schindler’s List,” the distributors of both films say they will stick to their planned slow, limited-release pattern. The thinking is to let word-of-mouth grow and allow the wider releases to coincide with the publicity surrounding the announcement of the Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 22 and the Academy Award nominations on Feb. 9.

TriStar Pictures president of domestic distribution Bill Soady said that the studio always expected that “Philadelphia” would play strongly in the three cities it opened in last Wednesday--Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.

“We always knew this is not the kind of picture people would want to see immediately following Christmas dinner,” Soady said, explaining why the film will not open in more cities until Jan. 14. For the weekend, “Philadelphia” grossed $143,433 on four screens and has accumulated $223,862 since opening on Wednesday.

A Universal Pictures spokesman said the studio will stay with its plan to slowly open “Schindler’s List” in January and February. Currently, the film is playing in 33 cities at 74 theaters and has grossed $2.8 million since opening Dec. 15. It will be Jan. 7 before Universal adds more cities.

In other limited releases, MGM’s “Six Degrees of Separation” grossed $169,000 for the weekend on 19 screens and has a total of $363,745 after three weekends; Paramount’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” took in $62,733 at six theaters and has a total of $188,385 after two weekends; the Goldwyn Co.’s “The Summer House” grossed $161,542 on 60 screens and has gathered $177,000 since opening Dec. 21, and Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth,” which opened Christmas Day, made $379,807 on 63 screens.

Christmas Weekend Box Office

Weekend Gross/ Screens/ Weeks in Movie (Studio) Total (millions) Average Release 1. “The Pelican Brief” $11.1 2,008 2 (Warner Bros.) $36 $5,540 2. “Mrs. Doubtfire” $9.3 2,305 5 (20th Century Fox) $89.1 $4,065 3. “Tombstone” $6.5 1.504 1 (Disney/Hollywood) $6.5 $4,292 4. “Sister Act 2” $5.3 2,178 3 (Disney/Touchstone) $24.2 $2,423 5. “Beethoven’s 2nd” $4.2 2,041 2 (Universal) $15 $2,085 6. “Grumpy Old Men” $3.9 1,244 1 (Warner Bros.) $3.9 $3,115 7. “Wayne’s World 2” $3.5 2,320 3 (Paramount) $31 $1,550 8. “Geronimo: An American Legend” $1.7 1,636 3 (Columbia) $11.1 $1,042 9. “The Piano” $1.4 516 7 (Miramax) $13 $2,755 10. “Schindler’s List” $1.3 74 2 (Universal) $2.8 $22,165

SOURCE: Exhibitor Relations Co.