The Oscar contenders generating box-office heat

Thank Sagan and the stars for awards season. If it weren’t for those cold eight (or so) weeks spanning Christmas and Valentine’s Day, box-office figures would be permanently yoked to beachball and deckchair sales, as a quirky statistical spike of summer.

To this end, most of this season’s Oscar contenders – save

The Dallas Buyers Club

, released here on February 7th – have already come out to play. Last weekend,

The Wolf of Wall Street

debuted at the top of the Irish chart with

497,873. On its second week of release,

12 Years a Slave

boasts a running total of

726,175.

American Hustle

, its primary gong rival, has taken

999,522 after five weeks.

Philomena

, meanwhile, is still out there, with

1.3 million (and counting) in its Irish kitty. As is

Gravity

with

2.2 million.

Big movies – well, d’uh – continue to make big money. Franchises continue to muster decent business.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire

took

2,730,127 over five weeks; last weekend

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

was sitting on

2,904,402.

But the demographic shifts observed in the Republic of Ireland marketplace last year remain evident.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

– arriving on the back on an exemplary and expansive publicity campaign – has raked in

1,916,685 on its fifth week in Irish cinemas. It’s a good showing but it’s a far cry from the days when twentysomethings were so much more plentiful on the ground. Back in 2009,

The Hangover

took

4,888,249. And as recently as 2011,

Bridesmaids

scored

4,310,172, with several boffo comedies nipping at its heels, notably

The Guard

(

4,029,322),

The Inbetweeners Movie

(

3,090,494) and

The Hangover 2

(

3,888,913). Last year, by comparison,

The Hangover 3

managed just a little under

2.5 million.

It’s not a catastrophe: ROI admissions did, according to the nice folks at

Carlton Screen Advertising

, drop by 5 percent (from

107 million to

102 million) in 2013. But cinema punters abhor a vacuum. Where younger auds once flocked to comedies, older folks now frequent dramas like

Captain Phillips

and

Lincoln

.

Over Christmas, at the other end of the spectrum, the new, thriving family sector made a dent with such unlikely low-quality schlock as

Moshi Monsters

(

234,801 over two weeks) and

Walking with Dinosaurs

(currently standing

at

489,182 and the 10th spot in the chart).

Little wonder that

Frozen

, a genuinely terrific all-ages film, has made

3,062,416 to date and is currently sitting pretty at number four in the box-office chart. That film, of course, is in contention for multiple Oscars.

Thank Sagan and the stars for awards season, right?