10 Movies That Cashed In On Christmas Day

A captive audience and encroaching Oscar deadline may drive some Christmas day movie releases, but past successes tell the real story.
By Jason Notte ,

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Why do so many movies open on Christmas day? This year, it's because Hollywood will take any gift it can get.

There are myriad reasons movie studios load up Christmas day -- or this year, with Christmas falling on a Saturday, Christmas week -- with a marathon of offerings. Academy Award contenders need to be released before the Dec. 31 deadline, but also need that last-minute push to keep them fresh in the minds of voters and moviegoers. The latter's attention is most coveted, as they'll be the ones renting and buying DVD and Blu-ray copies of the nominated films once the awards are handed out.

"Academy Award nominations are always going to help DVD and Blu-ray sales of the film," says John Farr, editor of movie industry site

Best Movies By Farr

. "Is there an advantage to putting out your DVD of a film after it's won an Academy Award? Yeah, that's big."

Mostly, however, Christmas day movies thrive because families who don't dive into a turkey or ham after opening presents or don't celebrate the holiday at all want something to do, and the theaters are open. This has made Christmas week one of the largest-grossing weeks on the movie calendar, with

Amazon

(AMZN) - Get Report

-owned box-office tracker

BoxOfficeMojo.com

saying moviegoers spent $270 million watching

Sherlock Holmes

,

Avatar

,

Up In The Air

,

The Blind Side

and other films last Christmas weekend. That holiday push fueled the highest-grossing weekend at the box office since

The Dark Knight

and

Mamma Mia!

debuted on a $260 million weekend from July 18-20 in 2008.

"It's when everybody gets out, it's when everybody's shopping and it's when everybody has time to go to the movies," Farr says. "I'd like to give Hollywood credit for planning this meticulously, but I think they just want to end the year with some winning titles."

Last year's winners have been reduced to shadows of Christmas past, however, as movie attendance of roughly 106 million in November was lowest it's been in that month since 1995. Attendance year over year has dropped in each of the past four months, and while this year's year-to-date gross of $9.68 billion is outpacing last year's $9.53 billion during the same period, the 1.2 billion movie tickets sold thus far lags well behind last year's 1.4 billion and is on pace to be the smallest crowds the studios have drawn to theaters since 1996.

So what is Hollywood giving moviegoers to force a Christmas miracle this year? It may get some help from preholiday premieres of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie's

The Tourist

, the latest

Chronicles of Narnia

sequel,

Disney's

(DIS) - Get Report

long-awaited follow-up

Tron: Legacy

,

Warner's

(TWX)

kid-and-boomer-centric

Yogi Bear

, James L. Brooks' ensemble romantic comedy

How Do You Know

and Mark Wahlberg vehicle

The Fighter

. Much as the release of

Sherlock Holmes

drove Christmas weekend traffic last year, though, the holiday box office hinges on the mass appeal of Jack Black's PG-rated take on

Gulliver's Travels

and the third installment of the Ben Stiller/Robert DeNiro

Meet the Parents

series -- the PG-13

Little Fockers

.

Gulliver

's family-friendly PG may get it some early looks, but

Little Fockers

seems like a safer bet considering the first film made $330 million and the first sequel, 2004's

Meet The Fockers

, took home more than $516 million worldwide.

"The

Focker

'film' is probably going to do really well," Farr says. "I have no idea if it's going to be funny or any good, and my own view is that sequels of sequels decline in quality the higher the number, but this is the Hollywood formula of sequels and remakes -- if the prior two movies have done well, this should do well too."

Speaking of the Hollywood formula and remakes, many eyes will be on Oscar contender

True Grit

-- a remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic with Jeff Bridges taking on the role that won the Duke an Academy Award. The combination of proven material and a proven commodity such as Bridges could be tough for Christmas crowds to overlook.

"We've got Jeff Bridges who, in my opinion, is probably the finest actor over the age of 55 working today, with the possible exception of Tommy Lee Jones," Farr says. "I think it will probably do great business in the opening weekend. And none of this is surprising, considering he won an Oscar for

Crazy Heart

, everybody feels he's finally getting his due as an actor and he's playing the role that won John Wayne his only Oscar."

Judging by recent history, at least one of these films will be enough to pry millions of moviegoers away from their twinkling trees and torn wrapping paper. With a big assist from BoxOfficeMojo,

TheStreet

takes a look at the Top 10 Christmas Day openings and their holiday gross. Much like a big sack full of toys catered to the tastes of billions of people around the world, it's a mixed bag:

1. Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Box office gross:

$24.6 million

Robert Downey Jr. followed up his role in last year's biggest hit,

Iron Man 2

, by playing an eccentric, egomaniacal lothario of a crime fighter -- surprisingly, not in

Iron Man 3

. The biggest mystery about this film a year later isn't how

Snatch

and

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

director Guy Ritchie turned Arthur Conan Doyle's fairly benign bit of literature into the blow-up action hit of the holiday or how the American Downey's accent sounds somewhat more authentic than co-star Jude Law's genuine article, but that James Cameron spent years and millions making

Avatar

and getting a true 3-D movie to the masses and Americans

still

wanted to see Ritchie's film more on the biggest weekend of the year.

2. Marley and Me (2008)

Box office gross:

$14.4 million

Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, a cute dog: How studio executives didn't build a movie around these elements before John Grogan wrote his memoir is beyond us. Much like

Old Yeller

or

My Dog Skip

, however, this results in a memorable experience for everyone involved except the title character. When a PG film this popular ends this way, parents lose the "we're just taking Shep to live on a farm" lie for an entire generation.

3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Box office gross:

$11.9 million

F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been just fine with Brad Pitt aging in reverse for 166 minutes amid layers of CGI and love story. What he may not have predicted when he wrote

Benjamin Button

as a short story back in 1922 is that screenwriter Eric Roth would find the story so similar to his screenplay for Winston Groom's novel

Forrest Gump

that he'd basically turn Benjamin Button into Gump with better window dressing and plot devices. In the charitable spirit of Christmas, however, America forgave Roth for making them sit through an extra 50 minutes of a film they'd basically already seen. Fitzgerald will have to pardon director Baz Luhrmann and Leonardo DiCaprio, however, if their 2012 remake of

The Great Gatsby

uses Claire Danes as a last-minute replacement for Carey Mulligan's Daisy Buchanan and the Cardigans' "Lovefool" is played liberally at each of Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion parties.

4. Bedtime Stories (2008)

Box office gross:

$10.6 million

This is how wide Christmas' coattails were in 2008. Despite opening behind

Marley & Me

and

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

, this roundly awful Disney-endorsed Adam Sandler children's tale still managed to take in more than $10 million and score a place among the Christmas Top 5. Sandler's PG-rated turn as a magical hotel handyman managed to make

Billy Madison

and

Happy Gilmore

seem worthy of inclusion in the American Film Institute's Top 100, but in a year when four films with Christmas debuts pushed their way into the all-time Top 10, all it had to be was on screen after the presents were opened.

5. Ali (2001)

Box office gross:

$10.2 million

How does an R-rated film have such a big opening on Christmas? By placing a worldwide movie money magnet such as Will Smith in the role of a global sporting and cultural icon such as Muhammad Ali and having him turn in a performance worthy of a Best Actor nomination at the 74th Academy Awards. That Smith didn't win an Oscar for

Ali

but co-star Jamie Foxx would win one three years later for playing Ray Charles is still somewhat surprising. That R. Kelly went from his

Ali

-inspired song "The World's Greatest" and inspirational fare such as "I Believe I Can Fly" to Dave Chappelle sketches about his legal troubles and bodily functions in the same period is somewhat less so.

6. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Box office gross:

$9.9 million

Yet another holiday potluck with all the right fixin's. Throw in All-American favorite Tom Hanks, add Leonardo DiCaprio to spice it up a bit and give all the ingredients to Steven Spielberg for a nice 20th century period piece of a biopic. Oh, and base the film around a con man committing multimillion-dollar fraud by forging checks just so audiences can see how to

really

get what they want for Christmas. Unlike some of its Top 10 contemporaries, however,

Catch Me If You Can

took the time to be not only watchable, but good enough to earn Christopher Walken a Best Supporting Actor nomination and John Williams a nod for the film's score at the 2003 Academy Awards. You don't have to make a great film to rake in the box office cash on Christmas day, but there's no rule against it.

7. Aliens Vs. Predator -- Requiem (2007)

Box office gross:

$9.5 million

All sci-fi and action movie geeks wanted for Christmas was an R-rated battle between these two iconic races of space beast after seeing it played out in comic books, novels and video games years earlier. When the paper-thin, PG-13

Alien vs. Predator

(or AVP, as studio execs and nobody else call it) broke out, the faithful were furious. Seeing how Christmas is also a time of forgiveness, the folks at 20th Century Fox offered a mea culpa three years later with

Aliens Vs. Predator -- "R"

(get it?) and gave the bloodthirsty holiday crowd the violence, gore and harsh language they'd asked Santa for so many years earlier. For countless fans who'd spent their youth having "Who would win in a fight?" schoolyard debates and their adulthood waiting for one alien to burst from another alien's sternum, it really was the most wonderful time of the year.

8. Dreamgirls (2006)

Box office gross:

$8.7 million

There was one voice drowning out the seemingly endless playings of "Holly Jolly Christmas," "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" and "All I Want For Christmas Is You" back in 2006: Jennifer Hudson's. To steal the spotlight from Mariah Carey's Christmas song is one thing, but to completely steal the show from multimillion-dollar industry pro and Jay-Z tamer Beyonce Knowles and fellow Academy Award nominee Eddie Murphy is another. As the film of a Broadway blockbuster telling the thinly veiled story of Diana Ross and The Supremes,

Dreamgirls

was destined to be a box office success. Hudson's performance made it great and worthy of cutting Christmas dinner a bit short.

9. Valkyrie (2008)

Box office gross:

$8.5 million

The last of 2008's fearsome Christmas foursome was just too much for America to resist. Since much of America had last seen Tom Cruise on screen in 2006's

Mission Impossible III

-- the box office numbers support the premise that

nobody

saw him in 2007's

Lions and Lambs

-- he'd had a child with Katie Holmes, married her, split with Paramount Pictures over his views on Scientology, prescription medication, the "Nazi science" of psychiatry and the appropriate use of Oprah Winfrey's couch, and saw his Q rating fall 40% as a result. After an incognito role in

Tropic Thunder

, Cruise decided it was again time to play a lead role -- as a Nazi. The well-intentioned, Hitler-targeting Nazi role didn't sit well with many Germans during production, but was just fine with Americans, who pushed its Christmas weekend total to more than $30 million. That's a lot of rubbernecking for a disaster that never happened.

10. Patch Adams (1998)

Box office gross:

$8.1 million

Grind up every candy cane, chocolate mint, cookie and cake you can find, mix it with some nonalcoholic egg nog and hot cocoa, feed it to Robin Williams and let him regurgitate it into the mouths of child actors for nearly two hours while wearing a clown nose. That's exactly how sickeningly sweet and unwatchable this film was. If you think that's a harsh and unfair assessment, consider the real Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams' reaction in New Renaissance Magazine after this film about his life was released: "After the movie, there wasn't a single positive article about our work or me. There were dumb, stupid, meaningless things ... it made my children cry." Yes, this movie

made sick children cry

. We all gorge ourselves on things that aren't necessarily good for us around the holidays, but the best New Year's resolution that members of this film's 1998 Christmas audience can make is to never subject themselves to this saccharine-flavored big-screen sadism again.

-- Written by Jason Notte in Boston.

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Jason Notte is a reporter for TheStreet.com. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Esquire.com, Time Out New York, the Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, Metro newspaper and the Colorado Springs Independent.

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