Weekend box office: ‘Breaking Dawn’ wins slow weekend

The weekend following the long Thanksgiving holiday is traditionally sluggish for the film business — and this year was no exception.

With no new movies opening nationwide, audiences shied away from the multiplex after heading there in droves over turkey day. As a result, it was the second-slowest moviegoing weekend of the year, with ticket receipts totaling only $82 million, according to data compiled by Hollywood.com.

“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1” claimed the No. 1 spot at the box office for the third consecutive weekend, again besting “The Muppets.”

The vampire film pulled in $16.9 million, according to an estimate from distributor Summit Entertainment. After 17 days in theaters, the fourth installment in the series has grossed an impressive $247.3 million in North America. Still, that’s slightly lower than the $255.4 million the third “Twilight” film, “New Moon,” grossed during the same time period in 2009.

“I think our audience has grown a little bit older, and therefore their interests have changed — they may be shopping or doing other things they weren’t a year and a half ago,” the studio’s Domestic Distribution President Richie Fay said of the difference between the two “Twilight” films. “That audience was also a big repeat audience, so maybe this time they’ve only seen the movie once, when they would have seen it 41/2 times before.”

Heading into the weekend, it was expected that Walt Disney Studios’ “The Muppets” would be able to outsell “Breaking Dawn.” Despite being beloved by critics and moviegoers, word-of-mouth on the kid-friendly picture was not strong enough to propel it to the top spot. Instead, the movie came in far below expectations with $11.2 million, bringing its overall total to $56.1 million since its opening over Thanksgiving.

Dave Hollis, Disney’s executive vice president of distribution, said he believes the film is in the process of “transitioning into being a family film” after playing to a large contingent of nostalgic adults last weekend. (Roughly 65% of the crowd who saw the movie upon its debut last weekend was over the age of 18.)

“Last weekend, we had that white-hot core of ‘Muppets’ fans come out en masse,” Hollis said. “The kind of business we’re doing right now is going to mirror our performances on family films — meaning it’s poised to have strong legs over time.”

Compared with their competition, “Hugo” and “Arthur Christmas” had relatively modest drops. Martin Scorsese’s 3-D “Hugo” fell 33% to $7.6 million, while “Arthur Christmas,” an animated 3-D holiday tale, saw receipts drop 39% to $7.4 million.

However, “Hugo” is still expanding into theaters nationwide; this weekend, it played in just more than 1,800 locations. Paramount Pictures is rolling out the movie slowly in hopes of capitalizing on the movie’s stellar critical reviews and awards buzz.

But the picture about an orphan living in a train station in 1930s Paris was also far more expensive to produce than “Arthur Christmas.” The live-action film had a budget of between $150 million and $170 million, whereas the animated movie cost about $100 million to make. So far, both films have grossed around $25 million.

amy.kaufman@latimes.com