Holiday Weekend Box Office: January 13-16

Courtesy of Box Office Mojo:

1.  Contraband - $28.8 million

2.  Beauty & the Beast 3D - $23.5 million

3.  Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - $14.2 million

4.  Joyful Noise - $13.7 million

5.  Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - $10.5 million

6.  The Devil Inside - $9.1 million

7.  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - $8.1 million

8.  Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked - $7.8 million

9.  War Horse - $7.1 million

10.  We Bought a Zoo - $6.8 million

Mark Walhberg had a lot of reasons to smile this weekend, as he enjoyed a terrific opening for his new action thriller Contraband, which easily won the extended holiday weekend box office with an estimated $28.8 million.  Despite middling reviews, the film appeared to be the go-to destination for action fans who've already seen the new Mission Impossible movie (although that had another strong $14.2 million weekend), and with an "A-" Cinemascore, odds are good that it will stick around at the multiplexes for awhile during the usually dreary winter box office period.

Nostalgia and a 3D conversion won for second place this weekend, as Disney's Beauty & the Beast was welcomed back to theaters with $23.5 million.  Not counting the extra day for the holiday, it's $17.7 million for Friday-Sunday was well below the $30.2 million that The Lion King opened with last fall, but for a 21-year-old movie that's readily available on blu-ray (and, ironically, in 3D as well), it's still pretty damn good.  Let's see if the 3D re-release goodwill continues when The Phantom Menace returns to theaters next month.

The weekend's other new release, Joyful Noise, did all right over the holiday with $13.7 million.  It's not great, but not awful either. 

If you're looking for awful, look no further than last week's champ, The Devil Inside, which plummeted  77% from last weekend's first place finish.  Bad word of mouth didn't just get out...it appeared to race out like an ebola virus warning.  However, since the movie's reported budget was somewhere around $1 million, it's still a hit.

Next weekend sees the releases of yet another Underworld movie, this time it's Underworld: Awakening, as well as Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, starring Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender, and George Lucas' high-flying story of the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails.