The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe has
regained its position at the top of the year’s last US weekend box
office chart, relegating King Kong to the lowly second place spot.

Who’d have thought it – a film about a lion that’s a bit like Jesus is turning out to be a bigger box office hit than a film about a massive ice-skating monkey.

Back in the summer, observers of box office trends were in floods of tears at the thought that people might just prefer buying
a movie on DVD and watching it at home on their massive, crystal-clear surround-sound
plasma screens instead of forking over most of their wages to sit in a
big dark room watching 45 minutes of adverts and listening to pikeys
squawk into their mobile phones.

But thanks to huge films like The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion,
The Witch And The Wardrobe, King Kong and the latest Harry Potter film
coming out in the last few weeks of 2005 and taking piles of box office
cash, the same movie people have been able to kid themselves that
Hollywood isn’t really in that much trouble. And nothing can dampen their
spirits – not even the relative under-performance of King Kong or the
terrifying knowledge that Big Momma’s House 2 is just a few weeks away.
Here’s the estimated US weekend box office chart…

1 - The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
(If The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe was set in the current day, Mr Tumnus would be on some kind of child sex offender’s
register, we’re certain of it) $23,900,000

2 - King Kong (And so it becomes clear – it’s not Peter Jackson
movies that people like, it’s elves and wizards and shit like that)
$23,300,000

3 - Fun With Dick And Jane (In which Jim Carrey does his best to
reverse any goodwill that Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind might
have earned him) $16,000,000

4 - Cheaper By The Dozen 2 (Good news! Now that Cheaper By The Dozen
2 is out, we won’t have to wait as long for Cheaper By The Dozen 3 and the collector’s edition Cheaper By The Dozen trilogy box-set DVD!
Hurrah!) $13,100,000

5 - The Family Stone (Of course, the real Family Stone is made of
Sly Stone, Sharon Stone, Joss Stone, Ray Winstone, Fred Flintstone and
assistant professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Centre for Cognitive Science at Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey Matthew Stone. Now there’s a film) $7,400,000

6 - Rumour Has It (Rumour has it that anything starring both Kevin
Costner and Jennifer Aniston is going to be terrible) $7,100,000

7 - Memoirs Of A Geisha (We expect the memoirs go like this:
"November 13th – got roped into doing this dodgy-looking film about
Geishas by that fool who directed Chicago") $7,000,000

8 - Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire (We got tricked into seeing
the last Harry Potter film because we heard Ian Brown was in it. He
was. For about two seconds. We heard that Jarvis Cocker was in Goblet
Of Fire, so we went to see that too. Guess what? About two seconds)
$6,100,000

9 - The Ringer (A movie about about a man who pretends to be
disabled to win the Special Olympics. Yes, exactly like that episode of
South Park) $5,200,000

10 - Munich (To give Munich the big War Of The Worlds blockbuster
treatment, Steven Spielberg changed the original ending of the script to a finale
where the members of Black September all die suddenly of the common
cold and then Morgan Freeman does a heartwarming voiceover) $4,600,000

Read more:

Projected estimates for the top ten – Box Office Prophets

[story by Stuart Heritage]