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Another trio of openers at the box office, another weekend of futility.

The weekend that is the bridge between James Bond and Katniss Everdeen was never going to be huge – who wants to land their big film between known franchises like The Hunger Games and Bond? Openers this weekend included a Christmas movie in Love the Coopers, the Chilean mine rescue story The 33, and the latest faith/football story, My All American. We’ve also got Oscar expanders with Spotlight and Brooklyn, both moving from a handful of screens to a couple of dozen. That means it’s a repeat weekend at the top, as Spectre and The Peanuts Movie dominate by default.

Our number one film for the second straight weekend is obviously Spectre, as James Bond comes off his $70 million debut looking to hold decently this weekend. Skyfall fell 53% in weekend two, but Skyfall no longer is the best comparison for Spectre, given the poorer reviews and audience reception than the previous Bond film. A better comparison now is Quantum of Solace, the more questionable 2008 Bond entry, which fell 60% in its second weekend. Solace, however, was dealing with the debuts of both Twilight and Bolt, which combined for about $96 million in new business while Solace was attempting to have a second weekend.

Given the fact that this weekend’s openers were only able to put up about $15 million, the skies should be clear for a strong hold this weekend, right? Not so fast – The Peanuts Movie continues to hog some big venues and could be pulling parents away from Spectre to see Snoopy and Charlie Brown with their kids. At the end of the day, given the opening and the overseas response thus far, I think Sony and MGM would have been quite happy for a hold in the 50% range, if they were lucky enough to get it.

As BOP’s Tim Briody reported yesterday in the Friday Box Office Analysis, Spectre earned $10.2 million over its second Friday, off 63% from the Thursday preview inflated first Friday. You may be surprised to hear that I think this is a decent Friday-to-Friday hold, as it didn’t match Skyfall’s Friday-to-Friday drop (60%), but it did beat the Quantum of Solace’s 69% Friday-to-Friday plunge. That put Spectre right where it wanted to be for the rest of the weekend – almost on par with Skyfall, but much better than the dreadful Quantum of Solace.

Because the 63% Friday-to-Friday drop for Spectre included those pesky Thursday previews, we knew that its percentage was going to improve drastically over the remainder of the weekend. Without the Friday rush to get out and see the new Bond like we saw last weekend, the internal weekend multiplier for Spectre was much better than last weekend at 3.47, and the latest Bond was able to manage a weekend gross of $35.4 million. That puts the weekend-to-weekend drop at 50%, a figure that Sony and MGM should be quite pleased with, even if the lack of competition made things look more promising than releases in the past. What most don’t realize is that Skyfall’s second weekend went up against Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 ($141 million opening), and the expansion of Lincoln, which earned over $20 million.

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