£0
$0
$0It's the last chart of 2020 and after many delays this year Wonder Woman 1984 makes its debut in cinemas and tops the US box office.
Also making high debuts over the festive holiday are Tom Hanks in News Of The World and Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman, both films are getting Oscar attention.
Further down the box office a new live action Pinocchio (not Disney) enters at 7.
US box office Quickview
This weeks top 5 US box office breakdown 25th - 27th December 2020.
After being delayed a number of times due to cinema closures forced on by the COVID-19 pandemic the Wonder Woman sequel directed by Patty Jenkins finally got a release in cinemas on Christmas day, it also got a release on HBO Max the same day.
With this in mind the movie has turned into a success and with a total opening weekend of $16.7 Million it is the bigest opening since cinemas closed.
The future then looks good for the superhero movie, and with only 10% of US homes having HBO Max for many it might be the only way to watch the film.
Tom Hanks stars in the new movie from director Paul Greengrass which this week makes its debut at number 2 with $2.4 Million.
Unlike the Wonder Woman movie it is only available to see in cinemas and most like will be for the next few weeks.
The animated sequel falls to number 2 this week with a weekend gross of $1.7 Million, 14% down from last week.
This puts the movies total gross at $30 Million after 5 weeks of release and is the second best movie during the pandemic.
After making its debut at the top of the box office last weekend the Paul W.S. Anderson directed movie fallt hard to number 4 this weekend with $1.12 Million, 49% down from last week.
The movie has taken $4.21 Million after 2 weeks of release.
Finally on the top 5 is director Emerald Fennell new movie which stars Carey Mulligan in what is being touted as an Oscar worthy performance.
The film took $680,000 on its debut week of release and entered at number 5.
It's not often that I take much notice of the Star Wars fan email that I get in my inbox on regular occasions these days, and usually wants to sell me something, but this time something caught my attention, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is about to be 30 years old!
Now apart from the sudden terror that I had of, how old does that make me, the email details the fact that this past weekend is the 30th anniversary of the screening of first images from the film in the form of a trailer.
I clicked the link and watched the trailer, first of all you start to realise how much cinema has changed in 30 years, and trailers certainly have a different job these days, but 2 things happened to me, first I thought about how people must have been amazed sitting in the cinema watching this, the trailer was attached to a re-release of Star Wars (something which rarely happens these days) and not only was this the only way could have got to see the trailer, no internet back then, and home video was for the rich, but the trailer was there to give people a taste of the movie, not market the film to the hilt.
The second thing that happened was I remembered when I first saw footage of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, a UK programme called The South Bank Show had done a special on Star Wars and at the very end they showed a quite long clip of the film. To note is the fact hat back on those days there was a quite lengthy gap between a film being released in the UK and America.
For a moment on Saturday it was a good trip down memory lane, so check out this link and enjoy the trailer of The Empire Strikes Back.
We all agree that the PSP is a smart little device and watching film on it can he handy for when your away from home, like on holiday. At the moment the only way to watch films is on UMD or by cracking the DVD and putting the film on a memory stick.
Sony have now revealed plans to release some films on Blu-ray what also includes a version encoded and shrunk to it fits on a memory stick, and more to the point is legal.
This is a very interesting experiment and its good to see that Sony is trying different ways of getting people using the PSP as more than a gaming device.
I hope that the compression brings the file size down enough that you can fit a couple of movies on a 1gb memory stick, although carrying 5 memory stick is certainly preferable to 5 UMD, and they can be reused.
I don't think Sony are going to abandon movies on the UMD format just yet but it's the first sign and with a PSP2 inevitable at some point possible in the next few years maybe it will be UMD free.
It is of course another reason to go the Blu-ray route rather than HD-DVD and another sign that HD-DVD really has no way back.