Kicking off the holiday season early as a familiar green character delivers a flash of green.

Studios are now jockeying for their calendar positions as each weekend going forward will be delivering new entries for the always busy seasonal session. Thanksgiving and Christmas are reliable busy so the distributor are going to be sending out a steady stream of box office bait.

Starting things off a bit early the first Christmas title is out and demanding attention as it swipes the top money from the restful holdover titles. A number of other new arrivals joined in, hoping to nab their share of the early arriving money, but those titles woke in the morning to see they had their holiday dreams stripped bare.

THE GRINCH – $66 Million
Universal decided to tap a proven property and rework the very familiar Christmas classic by reworking the story, similar to the concept of the 2000 live-action version. This time the studio went with their Illumination animation partner division (makers of the Minions films) and they found some good money to be made with the Dr. Seuss object lesson about the commercialization of the holiday. There is ample advertising for this one as Universal went with a truly global push, coming up with dozens of promotional partners and numerous original commercials cut for some.

2. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY – $30.85m
The surprisingly strong Freddy Mercury/Queen biopic continues to impress. This weekend bares only a -40% drop as the adults continue to be impressed. Audiences have given the film a solid “A” CinemaScore which indicates the word of mouth push will be strong. The title has now jut hit $100 million already.

3. OVERLORD – $10.10m
A difficult sell here, as you are looking at a World War 2/zombie mashup. Despite getting pretty favorable reviews, with roughly 80% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, there was a limited audience to begin with and a busy field at the top of the list, leaving little money remaining.

4.THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS – $9.56m
A major disappointment for the House of Mouse last week this expensive reworking of the holiday ballet (budgeted at over $120 million) has held just okay, at a -53% drop. To date it has only drawn $35 million, and globally the title has failed to latch on with audiences as well.

5. THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB: A NEW DRAGON TATTOO STORY – $8.01m
Also suffering from parents being occupied either by a Grinch, or a Queen, this attempt at revisiting the already worked over “Tattoo” with Claire Foy taking over the role of Lisbeth Salander. The story is based on the book that followed the original series, by a different author, and so there is distancing going on with the built-in audience.

6. A STAR IS BORN – $8.01m
Holding in a fashion typical with a serious adult drama the Bradley Cooper project is still around after six strong weeks. A drop of only -27% is padded by consistent weekday numbers, as the title is climbing closer to the $200 million mark.

7. NOBODY’S FOOL – $6.54m
Taking a usual dip seen in Tyler Perry films, this one of -56%, the opening last week was rather soft for his films and as a result this one may struggle to reach the usual $50 million range he consistently hits.

8. VENOM – $4.84M
It has done well after a 6 week run and has now hit over $200 million. It will be interesting to watch and see if “Star Is Born” can perform better in the longer run, even though that title never was in the #1 position. Internationally it has exploded. Just opening in China, the film scored an immense $110 million debut there, pushing the global to $675 million.

9. HALLOWEEN – $3.84M
Given the holiday has passed it makes sense the interest will now recede for this success. It drops over 1,000 screens, to little surprise. But this was a BlumHouse co-production and now at almost $250 million globally it stands as the most successful release for that budget studio.

10. THE HATE U GIVE – $2.07M
The Fox boutique title has managed to pull in a respectable $26 million.