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How big is the bump? Let’s use Moana as an example. Nothing says holiday movie season like an animated classic from Disney. And Moana has torn up the box office since its release. Through last Sunday, the tale of a heroic island “not a princess” had grossed $162.9 million. A paltry $5.5 million of that total came from weekdays last week. Let’s contrast that to this week’s total. Moana grossed almost as much on Monday and Tuesday, $5.4 million, as it did the entirety of last Monday-Thursday. Yesterday alone, it gained $2.6 million, which is the most it earned on a non-holiday weekday since November 29th.

Films obviously aren’t supposed to work like that. They depreciate over time, burning off box office in the process. During the period of December 18th - January 2nd this year, it’ll work somewhat differently. And we’re not up to the good times yet. Those come next week when many North Americans have the whole week off.

While I’ll have plenty of points of discussion in the coming days, let’s stick with the basics on day one. We’re going to run through the important films in the top 10, comparing in-release titles to their prior Thursday performances when possible. This methodology will give you the best possible understanding of the Twelve Days of Box Office.

Finishing in first place is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first standalone film in the seminal science fiction franchise. It’s going to dominate the conversation over the next few days as the unquestioned behemoth in North American theaters. Alas, its Thursday discussion is a bit pointless since last Thursday didn’t technically have an official box office total. Disney grafted that into Friday as well. Even if we used the Thursday total that we know it earned, $29 million, that’s still going to skew the picture as it was opening day for a Star Wars movie. Frontloading doesn’t frontload more frontloadedly than that.

All that matters for now is that we have a baseline for Rogue One moving forward. It earned $16.8 million on Thursday, a gain of 12% from Wednesday. That’s important in and of itself since Thursday is supposed to be the worst box office day of the week. Rogue One is sitting at $222 million after a week in theaters, which sounds dazzling as long as we don’t compare it to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Last year at this time, Star Wars fans had already purchased $390.9 million in tickets for the movie that they’d spent their childhood dreaming about. We’ll come back to Rogue One in coming days, especially in the holiday Weekend Wrap-Ups.

Second place went to Sing, the Universal animated musical that debuted the day before yesterday. After starting with $11 million, it fell only 13% to $9.6 million, bringing its two-day total to a solid $20.6 million. It’s going to be another hit for the team that introduced the world to Despicable Minions. Sing follows a pattern that the films in second and third place follow, too. Passengers and Assassin’s Creed joined it in starting their box office runs on Wednesday. Both of them performed better on day one than day two, an ordinary phenomenon at this time of year. It’s primarily important since these are the only three films in the top ten that declined on Thursday. Everything that was already in release enjoyed the Twelve Days bump.

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