‘Violent Night’ Boosts Weak Box Office with Unholy Horror

Early December box office is worse than usual and next weekend will be rock bottom with no new wide studio openings.

After that, “Avatar: The Way of Water” (Disney) comes to the rescue.Thanksgiving holdovers and expansions drive this period and this year was a recipe for weak results with a disastrous Disney animated release (“Strange World”), lack of interest in “Devotion” (Sony), expansions of “The Fabelmans” (Universal) and “Bones and All” (United Artists) that don’t to come close to their potential and only one week for Netflix’s limited “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”It would have been worse without Universal smartly placing a new lower-budget (20 million) horror film into the void.

Tommy Wirkola’s “Violent Night” with David Harbour as a decidedly aggressive Santa Claus came to the rescue of a family under siege and brought a 13.3 million opening, above projections.

Helped by better-than-average initial reaction,

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