BOX OFFICE: ‘Catching Fire’, ‘Frozen’ Vie For Top Spot Around $30M Each; ‘Out Of The Furnace’ Not So Hot

BOX OFFICE: ‘Catching Fire’, ‘Frozen’ Vie For Top Spot Around $30M Each; ‘Out Of The Furnace’ Not So Hot

BOX OFFICE THUMBNAIL: Out of the Furnace (wide after opening Wednesday in four theaters) looks weak. Inside Llewyn Davis (opened limited in four) is very strong. Thor: The Dark World surpasses $ 600 million this past week. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen both headed to $ 30 million weekends.

UPDATE, 10:49 p.m. PST: Based on Friday night ticket sales, Lionsgate’s Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Disney’s Frozen continue to be in a dead heat to claim the weekend’s top box office spot. Catching Fire is now estimated around a $ 28.3 million weekend while Disney’s Frozen is skating in at $ 28.2 million and the two films’ per screen averages are almost identical. Inside Llewyn Davis is very strong in its limited bow on 4 screens for CBS Films with a healthy $ 110,000 per Friday night which brings its estimated per screen for the weekend up to around $ 86,000. Relativity’s Out of the Furnace is as expected around $ 6 million for third place and Disney/Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World is in fourth with an estimated $ 4.4 million as it is expected to push its cume over the $ 190 million mark. It looks like Disney may have three pictures in the top five th is weekend with the Vince Vaughn-starring Delivery Man breaking out of the pack to serve up a $ 3.3 million to $ 3.6 million weekend for the studio to pull slightly ahead of Open Road’s Homefront which is a little over $ 3 million at the moment. It will be interesting to see how much the weather affects attendance for these updated estimates as much of the nation faces ice storms and plunging temperatures.

EARLIER, 5:22 pm PST: This is my first week back reporting on the movie business after a years-long hiatus. There are new execs, the business models have changed (foreign box office has grown in importance, what we used to call the ancillary marketplace â€" future revenue streams â€" is different), and as one producer noted, P&A costs now really should be called something else since the rise of digital … so maybe, marketing and distribution costs (M&D). But overall, the game around town is pretty much the same — and that includes box office. But no matter all the jockeying, guesstimating and manipulating, the game of whether a picture beat or didn’t beat expectations (which is all about whether the tracking numbers are good or not), all that matters at the end of the day for a film is the final revenue numbers all totaled.

Related: Deadline Advisory: Anita Busch Taking Over Box Office Beat

Behind the scenes, the business has  grown a little more sophisticated â€" or less, depending on your viewpoint â€" in that distributors now like to offer written “talking points” to journalists (all off the record, of course) to better guide them in their reporting. To those of you who haven’t heard of them, “talking points” are what PR people put together for their clients (executives, talent) to keep them on point and focused to push what the distributor thinks is most important: managing perceptions.

So budget numbers will be fudged and M&D costs will be muddied — all in the hope of hiding the perceived failures or real failures at the box office and to make films look more successful than they are. The domestic box office is one revenue stream and certainly the best bet at recouping your production and M&D costs, but it is not the final factor.

The question that should be asked and often to truly determine success or failure is: Will the film make money after all revenue streams are taken into account? The only way to determine that is to do breakdowns by budget, financial structure and M&D costs and splits, and ultimately it always takes you into the scary Hollywood studios’ accounting offices where they work their …. er, um … “magic.”

All that said, here are the domestic box office estimates for the weekend:

The box office will continue to be dominated by Lionsgate’s female-driven action sequel Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Disney’s family film Frozen, both of which are expected to make about $ 30 million this weekend, competing for this weekend’s top spot. Catching Fire is in its third weekend of release, on 4,163 screens, and Frozen in its second week of wide release but third weekend in theaters (3,742 screens), and it will get the family traffic on Saturday.

Catching Fire is hovering in the $ 30 million range with Frozen, at the moment, estimated to push a bit higher than that around $ 32 million.

It looks like the newcomer Out of the Furnace will take the third spot. The dark and violent drama — albeit a quality cast including Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson and Zoe Saldana — from director Scott Cooper and distributed by Relativity opened on four screens Wednesday to tiny per-screen numbers and is opening wide today in 2,101 locations. It is expected to take in around $ 5.5 million to $ 6 million but likely will be competing for moviegoers with Open Road’s Homefront.

Thor: The Dark World in its fifth week is still playing hard on 3,074 screens and looks like to take the No. 4 spot with $ 4 million more. The film crossed the $ 600 million mark at the global box office (with the breakdown being domestic â€" raking in $ 188.9M and international, $ 411.8M) this past week, marking the third Disney movie and second Marvel film in 2013 to do so (Iron Man 3 and Disney/Pixar’s Monsters University). However, it already has surpassed the worldwide box office cumes of the original Thor ($ 449 million) and Iron Man ($ 585 million).

The fifth spot seems somewhat logjammed with Homefront, The Book Thief, Philomena and Delivery Man all in contention, but the odds-on favorite is Homefront with a little over $ 3 million in its second weekend.

The Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis looks to pull in a hefty per-screen averages for CBS Films in limited release (4 theaters) — anywhere between $ 70,000 and $ 80,000 per. (In comparison, the Coens’ 2009 film, A Serious Man, had a per of $ 41,890).

Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom is holding strong in 4 theaters, down only about 33% from a week earlier after yesterday death of the beloved Nelson Mandela. (All films will be down from last weekend due to the Thanksgiving holiday and bad weather across much of the country.)

Related: Nelson Mandela’s Death: Hollywood Reacts

So, to my earlier point, let’s look at the newcomer Out of the Furnace. Will it make its money back? The film’s production budget ended up being around $ 27.3 million-$ 28.3 million. It was brought into Pennsylvania with a $ 31,837,061 budget, of which $ 17,997,299 got the state’s 25% tax credit of roughly $ 4,494,325. The splits between the distribs and exhibition vary on whether a film is being platformed or not. Catching Fire would likely be about 60%, compared with less than 50% for Out of the Furnace.

With about $ 20 million in M&D added to production costs, the total sum for Out of the Furnace is $ 48.3 million, so it needs to make about double that in all of its revenue streams to break even. Relativity presold foreign rights to Red Granite International for $ 16.5 million, so Relativity has offset some risk. Foreign box office on Out of the Furnace is not yet available, but it needs to make at least that overseas. And it needs to do well in its other incarnations throughout other revenue streams. The Netflix deal the distrib entered also offsets another $ 3.435 million for Relativity.

Opening next week: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner Bros, wide), Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas (Lionsgate, wide) American Hustle (Sony, limited), Saving Mr. Banks (Disney, limited),

Deadline.com