Pixar who?
Disney has pulled off a 3D-animated hit without the help of its Silicon Valley-spun hit factory, with "Rapunzel" adaptation "Tangled" debuting to $69 million over the five-day Thanksgiving-holiday weekend, according to studio estimates.
It wasn't the weekend's biggest performance, with Warner holdover "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" winning the frame with $78.8 million, but it was the second best Thanksgiving premiere ever.
The biggest Turkey Day-weekend premiere came in 1999, with Pixar's "Toy Story 2" grossing $80.1 million over the five-day holiday frame.
With "Tangled" -- which also tallied $13.8 million internationally -- projected to open to only open around $40 million domestically, the performance came as a bit of a surprise.
"Tracking has been off all year, but this weekend, it was amazingly off," noted one rival-studio distribution executive.
"It was somewhere between $20 million to $30 million more than the low and high end of (pre-release) expectations," added Disney theatrical distribution chief Chuck Viane. "I think what happened was, 'Harry Potter' was such a big cloud over the marketplace the last few weeks that it was hard to accurately track anything else."
Over a five-day holiday frame that was pretty much flat with the same period last year (down 3 percent), three other wide releases -- "Burlesque," "Faster" and "Love and Other Drugs" -- enjoyed fair-to-middling debuts.
Here's a look at the top 10 at the domestic box office. Report continues below chart:
Sony's Cher/Christina Aguilera musical "Burlesque" grossed $17.2 million over the five-day period, missing $20 million plus/minus estimations of some tracking firms but coming in line with studio estimates.
The PG-13-rated musical cost Sony $55 million to make, but received solid word-of-mouth, with moviegoers scoring it with an A-minus, according to customer-satisfaction grader Cinemascore.
"This picture is going to be very profitable for us," said Sony distribution president Rory Bruer, predicting solid international play for the film when it opens abroad in mid-December.
Narrowly missing its mid-teens forecast, Fox's Jake Gyllenhaal/Anne Hatheway rom-com "Love and Other Drugs" opened to $14 million. The film was co-produced by Fox and Regency Pictures at a cost of around $30 million.
CBS Films' "Faster," meanwhile, met its studio's $12 million forecast, with The Rock/Billy Bob Thornton action movie grossing an estimated $12.2 million over the five days.
With co-producer Sony handling foreign distribution, CBS Films is claiming only $12 million of exposure on negative costs.
CBS Films is hoping that, in the coming weeks, older male viewers of, say, SEC college football games and NFL Sunday coverage on the studio's sibling broadcast network will come see the movie.
It's a decidedly different strategy than the one CBS Films employed for its last film, the women-targeted J-Lo movie "The Back-Up Plan."
"And our audience is the only one that's not pre-occupied with shopping during the holidays," noted CBS Films distribution head Steven Friedlander.
