Les Mis tops UK box office for 3rd week

Tom Hooper’s screen adaptation of the Les Miserables musical has secured its third successive top spot in the UK & Ireland box office chart, with more than £4 million in its third weekend. It’s total to date, £24.6 million, make it the second most successful musical at the UK box office, after Mamma Mia!

All five of the top five are Best Picture Oscar nominees, with Django Unchained in second place with £2.4 million and Lincoln in third with £1.7 million, making it the most successful opener of the week.

An impressive result for its sixth week of release, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is fourth in the chart, having taken £1.1 million from Friday to Sunday, just a few thousand ahead of another opener, Zero Dark Thirty.

The Impossible made it to sixth place, with a shade over £1 million, from fewer screens. The poorly reviewed movie medley Movie 43 had a strong screen average, £2875, to earn seventh place in the chart, on a total of £788,000. Eighth was Monsters Inc 3D, with the highest grossing film of the top ten just behind it; The Hobbit took £624,000 in its 7th week of release.

The big disappointment of the week is for Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose comeback movie after nearly a decade in politics, The Last Stand, just scraped into the top ten in the last spot. With £539,000 in its first weekend, its screen average was just £1500, less than a quarter of Les Miserables’ third weekend haul.

Although it’s not so much a comeback, it’ll be interesting to compare his figures with next week’s Sylvester Stallone release, Bullet To The Head. Another Expendables star from the 80s, Bruce Willis, will be back with his next Die Hard film next month.