Weekend Box Office: Krampus Surprises, Good Dinosaur Stumbles

What had been forecast as a quiet weekend at the box office turned out to be not as quiet as expected, and the movies that fared best were unexpected, too. To no one's surprise, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 was number one for the third weekend in a row, but the movies in second through fourth place didn't sort out the way that experts had predicted.

Second place for the weekend went to horror comedy Krampus, which pulled in $16 million as compared to Mockingjay's $18.6 million. Krampus' earnings were more than twice as much as most observers had predicted, and it was enough to lift the movie past both Rocky sequel Creed and Pixar's The Good Dinosaur.

Those two movies ended the weekend in a photo finish, both of them scoring about $15.5 million in ticket sales. That's good news for Creed, which came to theaters with a modest production budget, but it wasn't such good news for The Good Dinosaur, which saw a big drop from its previous weekend and is not performing at all well by Pixar standards.

Overall, the weekend was a strong one. The total box-office take was up almost 23% compared to the same weekend last year, and the total was not too far off the record take for this weekend back in 2009.