Disney’s ‘Frozen’ freezes out ‘Paranormal’ spin-off

NEW YORK (AP) ― On a wintry weekend, Disney’s “Frozen” retook the box-office top spot with $20.7 million, freezing out the horror spin-off “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.”

Paramount’s “The Marked Ones” debuted in second place with $18.2 million, a total that includes Thursday night screenings, according to studio estimates Sunday. The film is a stand-alone story spun off from the lucrative, low-budget horror franchise “Paranormal Activity,” the fifth of which will be released in October.

But it wasn’t able to overcome Disney’s animated “Frozen,” which has been a hit for family audiences for the last seven weeks. It has now surpassed $600 million worldwide, making it the second highest Disney Animation release, behind “The Lion King.” It will soon pass that film’s $312 million domestic haul, too. It’s extremely rare for a film to lead the box office in its seventh weekend, a feat accomplished by the likes of “Avatar” and, to go further back, “Legends of the Fall.” It’s rarer still for a film to retake the box-office lead so late in its theatrical run. The last movie to do so was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004, according to box-office tracker Rentrak.

Another hold-over, Warner Bros.’ “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” came in third with $16.3 million in its fourth week of release after narrowly topping the busy Christmas weekend box office. Like “Frozen,” Peter Jackson’s second installment of his “Hobbit” trilogy has benefited from the lengthy holiday movie-going season. Its domestic cumulative total is $229.6 million.