FEAST OF FILMS ROLLING OUT FOR THANKSGIVING

It’ll be fire vs. ice at the box office over the long Thanksgiving Day weekend as Disney’s animated Frozen debuts to challenge The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Fire is likely to win, say the tracking studies, with a five-day haul of around $75-85 million after opening last weekend with $158 million. Frozen, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, is expected to come in at around $70-80 million. Three other films opening over the holiday are expected to be mere side dishes, attracting many shoppers at the mall as if they were the equivalent of yogurt, juice, and pretzel stands. There’s the musical Black Nativity, an adaptation of Langston Hughes’s “gospel song-play,” which itself was an adaptation of the Nativity story. Principally targeting black moviegoers, the film is expected to take in around $10 million. Then there’s the suspense drama Homefront, starring Jason Statham and James Franco, about an ex-DEA agent who movies to a small town, only to discover he picked the wrong town. Poorly reviewed, it’s expected to become a box-office turkey with around $5-8 million. Spike Lee’s thriller Oldboy, an adaptation of a Korean hit film, is being rolled out in just 583 theaters. Described as “gruesome” by several critics, it may not be the film to catch after Thanksgiving dinner.