Benedict Cumberbatch The Imitation Game — Cerebral performance … Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Photograph: Allstar/Black Bear Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd

The Imitation Game cracks UK box office, Interstellar keeps high orbit

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Second world war thriller starring Benedict Cumberbatch as codebreaker Alan Turing finds the perfect combination for success

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The winner

Is Benedict Cumberbatch a bona fide box-office star? After disappointing returns for The Fifth Estate last year, the industry concluded that his star power alone wasn’t enough to propel audiences into a film featuring a character (Julian Assange) they didn’t like, didn’t care about, or thought they knew plenty about already. Then again, the list of actors able to deliver hits from any material is vanishingly small. Hit movies invariably require the combination of the right actor in the right role, positioned for a defined audience.

The Imitation Game, evidently, brings together the actor, role and subject matter desired by every distributor and financier. With a debut of £2.74m (including £47,000 in previews) from 459 screens, delivering a robust average of £5,975, the film has landed at the top end of industry expectations. This is, after all, a second world war movie about a socially maladjusted maths boffin (Alan Turing), rather than, say, a heroic tank commander played by Brad Pitt in Fury, to give a recent example. The film doesn’t necessarily deliver the exciting action and inspiring bravery associated with the war-film genre. Its thrills – a race against time to crack the Enigma code and defeat the Nazis – exist in a more cerebral space.

Apt comparisons for The Imitation Game are hard to make, but the movie Enigma, likewise concerning the Bletchley Park codebreakers, debuted in 2001 with £797,000. Despite the familiarity of the bestselling Robert Harris novel for the earlier film, audiences are showing stronger interest in a real-life character – whose tragic denouement gives The Imitation Game some real emotional purchase – than a fictional composite. They may also be being drawn to the new film’s cast, which features Cumberbatch alongside Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance and Rory Kinnear.

Other comparisons that might be made for The Imitation Game include The King’s Speech (debut of £3.52m, including £227,000 in previews) and period spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (£2.81m). Both these films likewise exceeded expectations. Fury, incidentally, began with £2.69m including £698,000 in previews.

The chart-topper

Unsurprisingly, The Imitation Game failed to dethrone Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar from the top of the box-office. The sci-fi epic fell a respectable 29% from its opening weekend, and has now delivered £12.13m after 10 days. That compares with £14.71m for Gravity after two weekends of play, and £14.20m for Inception. The film should continue playing to a highly motivated core audience in the coming weeks, but will face strong competition for the broader blockbuster-goer – and especially for women and teenagers – with the arrival on Thursday of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1.

The festive hit

Not as beloved by critics, the Nativity! franchise has become a regular feature of the pre-Christmas cinema offer, beginning in 2009 with the first of the series. That one debuted with £793,000 from 346 cinemas. Three years later, sequel Danger in the Manger kicked off with a sturdy £1.61m from 435 venues. Now third instalment Dude, Where’s My Donkey?! begins with a slightly better £1.80m from 453 locations. The film has opened two weeks earlier in the calendar than its predecessors for the simple reason that Paddington has cheekily nabbed its traditional late-November date. You might imagine the new Nativity! might have suffered from landing a little before families are really focusing on Christmas, but that is evidently not the case. In fact, assuming it remains in cinemas all the way up to Christmas Day, the film may benefit from the extra two weeks of play.

Nativity! has traditionally enjoyed the virtue of being a genuinely home-grown alternative to Hollywood family films in the festive season, but this year shares that distinction not just with Paddington (arriving 28 November), but also Get Santa (released on 5 December). Dude, Where’s My Donkey?! director Debbie Isitt and backers eOne can take credit for proving that there is a viable and enduring audience for a British family film at Christmas.

The upscale smash

Adding another £1.69m in the past seven days, Mr Turner now stands at an impressive £4.38m after just 17 days of play. The third weekend saw it expand to 383 cinemas – much, much wider than any previous Mike Leigh film has ever reached in the UK. The expansion saw the weekend screen average dilute right down to £1,937 – although that might be considered not bad for a film in its third week of play. The film has now presumably reached its maximum breadth, and will start shedding those multiplex sites where the expansion was maybe a tad speculative.

The previous best for Mike Leigh was Vera Drake, with a £2.38m lifetime gross. Mr Turner is already nearly double that tally, and looks on course to triple it by the end of its run. It now faces big competition from The Imitation Game for older, upscale audiences.

The quiet disposal

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, does it make a sound? Third Person – the new film from Crash Oscar–winner Paul Haggis starring Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody, James Franco, Olivia Wilde, Maria Bello and Kim Basinger – crept out at the weekend on 10 prints, grossing £2,300. The film premiered at the Toronto film festival in September 2013, then waiting 14 months for a UK release. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it a “car wreck”, a “deeply dubious luxury-tourist fantasy” and “supercilious, incurious and glib”. One for Sony to forget ever happened, evidently.

The future

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For the first time in four weeks, takings are up (by a modest 2%) on the same weekend last year, which saw Gravity, Thor: The Dark World and Philomena continue their lock on the box-office chart. Overall, the current market ranks as almost the very definition of average, with takings down 2% on what Rentrak calls its “Rolling 52 Week Norm”, the average weekend for the past year. Grosses are now set to surge, with the arrival on Thursday of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, the penultimate entry in the franchise. You’d imagine that other distributors would be giving the date a wide berth, but in fact alternatives come from James Brown biopic Get On Up, Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones western The Homesman, Idris Elba home-invasion thriller No Good Deed, Jermaine Clement vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, Maggie Smith comedy-drama My Old Lady and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner Winter Sleep.