Disney’s animated feature narrowly edged out raunchy comedy Office Christmas Party to win the weekend, adding another $18.8 million to its impressive run both domestically and abroad. And yet, despite the respectable numbers from the weekend’s top two films, it was the weekend’s 15th-place finisher — director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land — that nearly set a new Hollywood record.
Chazelle’s follow-up to 2014’s Academy Award darling Whiplash, the musical La La Land premiered in just five theaters but raked in more than $855,000 from that limited opening. The film’s nearly unprecedented high per-theater average of $171,000 was the second-highest tally of all time for any film, coming in just behind the $202,000 per theater that The Grand Budapest Hotel earned in its first, limited screenings in 2014.
La La Land also had the highest per-theater average of any film released this year — a fact that bodes well for the movie’s upcoming expansion to more than 200 theaters December 16, then to even more locations December 25.
| # | Title | Weekend | U.S. Total | Worldwide Total |
| 1. | Moana | $18.8M | $145M | $238.8M |
| 2. | Office Christmas Party | $17.5M | $17.5M | $33.9M |
| 3. | Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them | $10.7M | $199.3M | $680M |
| 4. | Arrival | $5.6M | $81.4M | $129.8M |
| 5. | Doctor Strange | $4.6M | $222.3M | $645.7M |
| 6. | Allied | $4M | $35.6M | $69.5M |
| 7. | Nocturnal Animals | $3.2M | $6.2M | $16.2M |
| 8. | Manchester by the Sea | $3.1M | $8.3M | $8.3M |
| 9. | Trolls | $3.1M | $145.4M | $316.9M |
| 10. | Hacksaw Ridge | $2.3M | $60.8M | $83.8M |
Of the remaining movies in the week’s top 10 highest-grossing films, the Harry Potter prequel film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them added another $10.7 million in U.S. theaters but remained the top movie overall internationally for the fourth week in a row.
As for this upcoming week, the question is not whether Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will win the weekend, but how many records it will break in doing so. The Star Wars stand-alone film, which is set immediately before the events of 1977’s franchise-launching Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope and directed by Monsters and Godzilla filmmaker Gareth Edwards, arrives in theaters December 15 for preview screenings and is all but certain to be a massive blockbuster and the week’s top movie by a wide margin.
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