The Lego Movie 2 masters How to Train Your Dragon at UK box office

The winner: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Taking in £4.2m from 572 cinemas, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part has knocked How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World off the top of the UK box office after a single week’s reign. The Warner Animation title debuted significantly below the UK opening numbers achieved five years ago by The Lego Movie (£8.5m including £2.16m in previews). The number was also below the £5.32m debut for How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World last week.

Although Warner Bros waited five years to present the sequel to The Lego Movie, the studio also served up The Lego Batman Movie in February 2017 and The Lego Ninjago Movie seven months later. Cinemagoers may be feeling that four Lego-themed films in five years is more than generous. UK totals for the three previous movies are: £34.4m, £27.4m (Batman) and £9.73m (Ninjago).

The runner-up: Alita: Battle Angel With £3.2m at UK cinemas, including previews of £771,000, Alita: Battle Angel lands in second place. Distributor 20th Century Fox will probably view this as a decent result, since the film did not benefit from much preexisting awareness in the UK of its origins: Yukito Kishiro’s graphic novel series Gunnm.

Alita had been in development with producer James Cameron since at least 2003, but was sidelined in favour of projects such as Avatar. With a production budget estimated in the $150-200m range, Alita, directed by Robert Rodriguez, still faces a long road to profitability. Worldwide gross so far is $32m, with key territories including North America, China and Japan yet to come.

If previews are discounted from the Alita total, second-place honours at the UK box office really belong to How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, with £2.75m. The total after 10 days is a decent £9.6m, with the February halfterm school holiday ahead of it.

The audience winner: Green Book Enjoying the gentlest decline of any film in the UK Top 10 – or Top 20, for that matter – is Peter Farrelly’s Green Book. Declining just 13% from its opening session, the 1962-set road trip buddy movie grossed £1.7m at the weekend, pushing the total after 10 days to £3.62m. Audience reviews on the film look good: the IMDb user rating is a strong 8.3/10.

Green Book predictably missed out on the biggest prizes at the Bafta film awards on Sunday – losing best film to Roma and best actor to Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody – but successfully fought off a relentless challenge from Can You Ever Forgive Me?’s Richard E Grant to scoop best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali.

The awards season smackdown

The battle for fans of quality indie cinema intensified at the weekend with the release of Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True and Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased. The three new films faced the challenge that target audiences are already being catered to by the likes of Green Book, Mary Queen of Scots, Vice, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Favourite and Stan & Ollie. With all these titles – old and new – currently in the UK Top 20, this was a nine-way fight for essentially the same set of cinemagoers.

All Is True had the top opening among the three new films, albeit boosted by a more generous cinema count. It debuted with £267,000 from 252 cinemas, including £27,000 in previews. If Beale Street Could Talk delivered a much higher site average thanks to Entertainment One’s release into a tight 52 venues. The James Baldwin adaptation began with £252,000, or £170,000 excluding previews. Finally, Boy Erased, starring Lucas Hedges as a gay young man sent to a sexual orientation conversion programme by his religious parents, was a predictable ca

sualty, beginning with £119,000 from 116 cinemas, including negligible previews. The drama picked up a couple of Golden Globe nominations, including one for Hedges, but overall has not figured strongly in this year’s awards races.

Collectively, the nine award-bait films – which are all in the UK Top 20 – grossed £3.28m at the weekend. Exactly a year ago, the equivalent titles (Darkest Hour, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Post, Phantom Thread, The Mercy and Downsizing) grossed £2.86m in the second weekend of February. The Shape of Water, Lady Bird and I, Tonya subsequently arrived to give the 2018 awards season box office a boost.

The market

Overall, the market is a modest 8% down on the equivalent weekend from a year ago, which was led by franchise finale Fifty Shades Freed. It’s the fifth weekend in a row where box office takings fell below the results achieved in 2018. The news can only get worse, as last year mid-February saw the arrival of Black Panther. This time around, cinema bookers have their hopes pinned on Instant Family starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, Happy Death Day 2U and family adventure The Kid Who Would Be King from Attack the Block director Joe Cornish. Alternatives include Rosamund Pike as war reporter Marie Colvin in A Private War.

Top 10 films, 8-10 February

1. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, £4,016,730 from 572 sites (new) 2. Alita: Battle Angel, £3,198,180 from 534 sites (new)3. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, £2,750,729 from 566 sites. Total: £9,055,241 (2 weeks)4. Green Book, £1,070,922 from 573 sites. Total: £3,624,275 (2 weeks) 5. Glass, £560,579 from 412 sites. Total: £9,646,964 (4 weeks)6. Mary Queen of Scots, £526,167 from 469 sites. Total: £7,764,545 (4 weeks)7. Escape Room, £441,358 from 347 sites. Total: £1,636,555 (2 weeks)8. Vice, £330,197 from 318 sites. Total: £3,223,856 (3 weeks)9. Mary Poppins Returns, £275,315 from 452 sites. Total: £43,341,386 (8 weeks)10. All Is True, £266,767 from 252 sites (new)

Other openers

If Beale Street Could Talk, £252,462 (including £82,488 previews) from 52 sitesBoy Erased, £118,585 (including £1,109 previews) from 116 sitesPegasus, £74,070 (including £35,596 previews) from 15 sitesYoung Picasso, 54,046 (including £46,332 previews) from 15 sitesIntegrity, £6,728 from 14 sitesPeranbu, £2,640 from 4 sitesAmavas, £2,407 from 4 sitesIrupathiyonnaam Noottaandu, £1,909 from 20 sites

• Thanks to Comscore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.