The winner: Bohemian Rhapsody

Knocking A Star Is Born off the top of the UK box office after two weeks, Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody debuted with a commanding £6.48m (£9.53m including takings last Wednesday and Thursday). In other words, one movie involving a fair amount of singing has supplanted another, although neither is a musical.

Bohemian Rhapsody is already well on the way to becoming the biggest music biopic ever in the UK. Walk the Line, about Johnny Cash, grossed £10.4m in 2006. Straight Outta Compton (NWA), Notorious (Notorious BIG), What’s Love Got to Do With It (Tina Turner), Ray (Ray Charles) and The Doors were all more commercially modest. The semi-fictionalised 8 Mile (Eminem) grossed £13.3m in 2003.

Bohemian Rhapsody is the fourth music-based No 1 film this year, following The Greatest Showman, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and A Star Is Born. Mary Poppins Returns, which opens in December, will almost certainly be a fifth.

Bohemian Rhapsody is also the second chart-topper this year to suffer the loss of its director mid-shoot, the other being Solo: A Star Wars Story. In the latter case, incomer Ron Howard earned the director credit, with the original Phil Lord and Christopher Miller billed as executive producers. Bohemian Rhapsody’s original director Bryan Singer retains the credit, with his replacement Dexter Fletcher credited as executive producer.

The runner-up: A Star Is Born

For the fourth weekend in a row, A Star Is Born, which stars Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, posted UK takings above £2m, and after 26 days it has earned a nifty £19.2m. Among 2018 releases, Avengers: Infinity War and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom just scraped above £2m for the fourth weekend of UK release. The other titles this year that managed the feat are The Greatest Showman, Peter Rabbit, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Incredibles 2. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a 2017 release, also did so in January.

The family surge

The end of the half-term holiday saw a traditional surge in family titles, with Smallfoot, Johnny English Strikes Again, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, Hotel Transylvania 3: A Monster Vacation and The House With a Clock in Its Walls all recording box-office rises or modest drops compared with the previous session. These titles respectively earned fourth, fifth, sixth, 12th and 13th place in the chart. Look for them to start fading with the arrival in November of a new crop of family films: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, The Grinch, Nativity Rocks! and Ralph Breaks the Internet. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, out on 16 November, should play across the age demographic.

The YA alternative: The Hate U Give

Also benefiting from the half-term holiday was The Hate U Give, a 12A-certificate title adapted from the Angie Thomas YA novel. Weekend box office was £452,000, but its official debut total was more than double – £911,000 – swelled by takings over the Monday-to-Thursday period last week. The film essentially posted a seven-day opening number.

Comparisons for The Hate U Give are tricky, since the material isn’t dystopian sci-fi (Hunger Games, Maze Runner etc) or romantic comedy (Love, Simon). One comparison could be films based on novels by John Green. Paper Towns began with £2.07m in August 2015, which was likewise a seven-day opening figure. Another could be romantic drama Everything, Everything, which starred The Hate U Give’s Amandla Stenberg. It began in August 2017 with £453,000 on its way to £1.76m.

The market

Given that exactly a year ago the UK box office was boosted by the arrival of Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, it might have been imagined that the equivalent weekend this year would struggle to measure up. But, thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody and the strong performance of other titles – six films took more than £1m at the weekend – the market recorded a modest 6% rise. Cinema bookers may be looking with less confidence to the coming weekend, although they will be hoping for strong holds from the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star Is Born. New arrivals include horror-tinged boarding-school comedy Slaughterhouse Rulez, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and Mike Leigh’s Peterloo.

Top 10 films, 26-28 October

1. Bohemian Rhapsody, £9,530,463 from 659 sites (new)

2. A Star Is Born, £2,150,987 from 634 sites. Total: £19,238,711 (four weeks)

3. Halloween, £1,678,162 from 552 sites. Total: £5,854,328 (two weeks)

4. Smallfoot, £1,577,531 from 639 sites. Total: £7,691,245 (three weeks)

5. Johnny English Strikes Again, £1,544,459 from 586 sites. Total: £14,172,794 (four weeks)

6. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, £1,377,680 from 546 sites. Total: £4,918,129 (two weeks)

7. The Hate U Give, £911,309 from 368 sites (new)

8. Venom, £855,826 from 438 sites. Total: £18,452,016 (four weeks)

9. First Man, £605,032 from 484 sites. Total: £6,559,818 (three weeks)

10. La Fanciulla del West – Met Opera, £186,621 from 199 sites (new)

Other openers

Die Walkure – Royal Opera House, £185,066 from 403 sites

Serce Nie Sluga, £69,973 from 73 sites

Baazaar, £49,106 from 35 sites

Beetlejuice (30th anniversary), £33,825 from 100 sites

Utøya – July 22, £18,924 from 25 sites

Katie, £15,810 from 27 sites (Ireland only)

Possum, £9,037 from seven sites

An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, £7,876 from eight sites

5 Weddings, £6,166 from eight sites

The Guilty, £5,072 from eight sites

Bad Reputation, £4,381 from four sites

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, £4,229 from 11 sites

The Necromancer, £3,127 from 30 sites

Donkeyote, £1,708 from three sites

The Evil Dead (rerelease), £1,615 from four sites

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