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‘Coco’ knocks off ‘Justice League’ to win holiday weekend box office

The reign of Justice League as Hollywood’s box-office champion certainly didn’t last very long.

Coco, Disney and Pixar’s latest animated feature, knocked Justice League off the top of the weekend box office rankings after just one week, and took home an impressive $71.1 million over the course of the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The animated movie was a win all around for Disney, receiving a rare A+ grade from audiences (via polling site CinemaScore) and 96 percent positive score from review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to go along with its big weekend.

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The winning weekend for Coco was the latest success story for Disney on the Thanksgiving holiday. The film’s weekend haul is the fourth-biggest overall across the five-day span from the Wednesday before the holiday and through the following weekend. (Frozen is the current record-holder with its $93.5 million holiday weekend, followed by Moana, then Toy Story 2.) All but one of the highest-grossing films for that span were released by Disney, with 2008’s holiday-themed romantic comedy Four Christmases the only non-Disney feature in the top 10.

# Title  5-Day Weekend    U.S. Total   Worldwide Total 
1. Coco $71.1M $71.1M $153.3M
2. Justice League $59.6M $171.5M $481.3M
3. Wonder $32.2M $69.4M $70.3M
4. Thor: Ragnarok $24.2M $277.4M $790M
5. Daddy’s Home 2 $18.6M $72.6M $87.6M
6. Murder on the Orient Express $18.6M $74.2M $196.8M
7. The Star $9.5M $22M $22.7M
8. A Bad Moms Christmas $6.7M $59.7M $92.8M
9. Roman J. Israel, Esq. $6.2M $6.2M $6.2M
10. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri $5.8M $7.6M $7.6M

As for Justice League, the film’s underwhelming performance in U.S. theaters is being mitigated somewhat by big numbers overseas. In many of the major international markets Justice League is outpacing Wonder Woman, so it will likely follow the trend set by many of Warner Bros. Pictures’ superhero movies that failed to live up to their box-office potential domestically but got a big boost from international audiences.

All of the remaining films in the weekend’s top 10 were returning movies, with Thor: Ragnarok continuing its successful run by adding another $24.2 million in U.S. theaters. The film also moved into seventh place in the list of the highest-grossing movies worldwide in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It now ranks just behind this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 on that list, and will likely pass the latter film in the weeks to come.

Most of the high-profile movies debuting this upcoming week are doing so in limited release, with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and James Franco’s The Disaster Artist both making limited debuts before expanding into wider releases at a later point. The lone exception is Woody Allen’s drama Wonder Wheel, which arrives in theaters Friday with its tale set on New York City’s Coney Island in the 1950s.

Rick Marshall
Former Contributing Editor, Entertainment
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
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