Box Office – December 15-17, 2023: WONKA, THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES, THE BOY AND THE HERON, & More

Box Office December 15-17, 2023

The theatrical movie box office results for December 15, 2023 through December 17, 2023 have been released.

The Box Office

Wonka premiered in the Number One spot at the United States box office over the weekend with $39 Million so far.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was Second at the United States box office over the weekend with $5.8 Million (a 37% drop from last weekend) for $145.2 Million so far. Worldwide, the film has made $292.3 Million.

The Boy and the Heron was Third at the United States box office with $5.5 Million (a 58% drop from last weekend).

Godzilla Minus One was Fourth at the United States box office over the weekend with $5 Million (a 41% drop from last weekend).

Trolls Band Together was Fifth at the United States box office over the weekend with $3.9 Million (a 35% drop from last weekend).

These films: Wish, Christmas with the Chosen: Holy Night, Napoleon, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, and Poor Things rounded out the top ten respectively.

Movies That Opened This Weekend

The films in the Top Ten that opened this weekend at the box office:

Wonka is a 2023 musical fantasy film directed by Paul King, who co-wrote the screenplay with Simon Farnaby, based on a story by King. It tells the origin story of Willy Wonka, a character in the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, featuring his early days as a chocolatier. The film is the third live-action adaptation of Dahl’s book, following Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). The film stars Timothée Chalamet in the title role and an ensemble cast including Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Tom Davis, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Grant.

Christmas with the Chosen: Holy Night is a 2023 American drama film. A young mother labeled impure. A shepherd boy considered “unclean”. A never-before-seen performance from Andrea Bocelli highlights seven music performances and two beautiful new monologues.

Next Week’s Films

Next week sees the release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Iron Claw, Migration, and a plethora of other films. Find my predictions on this releases in the weekly The Bottom Line column. A preview: Migration will be Number One at the box office.

The History of Box Office (and Profit Measurement)

“A box office or ticket office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a wicket.

By extension, the term is frequently used, especially in the context of the film industry, as a metonym for the amount of business a particular production, such as a film or theatre show, receives. The term is also used to refer to a ticket office at an arena or a stadium.

Box office business can be measured in the terms of the number of tickets sold or the amount of money raised by ticket sales (revenue). The projection and analysis of these earnings is greatly important for the creative industries and often a source of interest for fans. This is predominant in the Hollywood movie industry.

To determine if a movie made a profit, it is not correct to directly compare the box office gross with the production budget, because the movie theater keeps nearly half of the gross on average. The split varies from movie to movie, and the percentage for the distributor is generally higher in early weeks.

Usually the distributor gets a percentage of the revenue after first deducting a “house allowance” or “house nut”. It is also common that the distributor gets either a percentage of the gross revenue, or a higher percentage of the revenue after deducting the nut, whichever is larger. The distributor’s share of the box office gross is often referred to as the “distributor rentals”, especially for box office reporting of older films.”

Leave your thoughts on these Box Office results (via The Numbers and Wikipedia) and this article below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons.

Readers seeking more box office news can visit our Box Office Page, our Movie News Page, our Movie News Facebook Page, and our Movie News Twitter Page.

Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Google News, Feedly, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Telegram, Mastodon, Flipboard, and Threads.