The winner: Glass

Resisting the challenge of new releases such as Vice, The Mule and A Dog’s Way Home, M Night Shyamalan’s Glass hung on at the top spot for a second week, with weekend takings of £1.94m, a decline of 42% from its opening session. Gross after 10 days is a decent £6.87m. For comparison, Split – which together with Shyamalan’s Unbreakable provided a precursor to Glass – stood at £6.03m at the same stage of its run.

With cinemas clogged with Oscar bait, Glass stands out as the film offering multiplex audiences something more commercially accessible. It will finally face some competition this Friday with Escape Room, followed five days later by the James Cameron-produced Alita: Battle Angel.

The awards battle

The battle between films positioned for awards attention is getting increasingly intense. Friday saw the arrival of Adam McKay’s Vice and the Nicole Kidman starrer Destroyer, both competing for screen space against Mary Queen of Scots, The Favourite, Stan & Ollie, Beautiful Boy and Colette.

Universal and Working Title should be happy to see Mary Queen of Scots hold its ground, declining a relatively slim 27%. Vice, landing one place below it, kicks off with £1.33m including modest previews – almost identical to the £1.3m (including negligible previews) launch for McKay’s The Big Short three years ago. Stan & Ollie, falling 41%, and The Favourite, down 28%, are likely to emerge as the two big winners of the season at the UK box office. Respective tallies so far are £8.26m and £13.1m.

Destroyer landed down in 19th place, with a mediocre £106,000 from 113 cinemas. The tale of an undercover cop received some encouraging reviews, but there are too many titles competing in the prestige space, and the film is uncertainly positioned between drama and genre title.

The losers: UK cinemas

While a large number of titles are performing at a decent level – including new entrants such as Japanese anime Dragon Ball Super: Broly (£852,000 including £546,000 previews), Clint Eastwood’s The Mule (£726,000) and family film A Dog’s Way Home (£702,000) – film for film, the market is alarmingly behind the pace of a year ago. The final weekend of January 2018 saw Darkest Hour, Coco, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, The Greatest Showman and Early Man all achieve box office above £2m. In 2019, no film grossed £2m in the final weekend of January.

Box office for the session overall is 36% below the same weekend a year ago, and this follows successive sessions when takings were 2% up, 20% down and 30% down on January 2018 equivalents. Indie cinemas are doing well, however, because the successful titles on release (such as Vice, Mary Queen of Scots and The Favourite) are especially suitable for those venues. The current dearth of commercially appealing alternatives is hurting the multiplexes.

The bounce-back: Free Solo

Now in its seventh week of release, Free Solo continues to defy gravity, with a box office rise of 145% from the previous weekend. There’s a reason for this: the Oscar-nominated climbing documentary landed in 43 Imax cinemas last Friday, swelling the takings. Gross currently stands at £1.49m, and a tally somewhere in the region of £1.7m looks likely.

Coming soon

Multiplex bookers will breathe a huge sigh of relief with the arrival this Friday of DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. The previous two films in the franchise grossed £17.4m and £25.5m at UK cinemas, and distributor Universal will be hoping to build on that success with this admired finale to the trilogy. Multiplexes will also be welcoming Escape Room – a high-concept survival tale that has been described as “Saw meets The Game” and has grossed $48m at US cinemas so far.

Meanwhile, awards season gets yet more intense with the arrival of Green Book, starring Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant. All four actors are Oscar-nominated for their roles. Lee Chang-dong’s acclaimed Burning provides a foreign-language alternative.

Top 10 films, 25-27 January

1. Glass, £1,936,631 from 559 sites. Total: £6,873,056 (two weeks)

2. Mary Queen of Scots, £1,518,819 from 545 sites. Total: £4,959,405 (two weeks)

3. Vice, £1,327,464 from 505 sites (new)

4. Stan & Ollie, £1,062,847 from 661 sites. Total: £8,264,459 (three weeks)

5. Mary Poppins Returns, £998,726 from 638 sites. Total: £42,133,214 (six weeks)

6. The Favourite, £965,996 from 569 sites. Total: £13,071,931 (four weeks)

7. Dragon Ball Super: Broly, £851,508 from 188 sites (new)

8. The Mule, £725,554 from 462 sites (new)

9. A Dog’s Way Home, £705,875 from 443 sites (new)

10. Love Yourself in Seoul – BTS World Tour, £518,810 from 291 sites (new)

Other openers

Second Act, £403,211 from 344 sites

Destroyer, £106,410 from 113 sites

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi, £92,500 from 55 sites

Schindler’s List (25th anniversary), £29,745 from 206 sites

Tortoise & The Hare – Northern Ballet Bite Sized Ballets, £17,132 from 153 sites

VIP Policeman, £6,502 from one site

Love Sonia, £4,571 from 13 sites

Bergman: A Year in a Life, £4,399 from four sites

On Her Shoulders, £3,588 from three sites

One Nation, One King, £3,050 from one site

Nina, £841 from one site

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