‘Christmas With the Chosen 2’ Caps Off Record Year for Fathom Events at Specialty Box Office

The specialty box office saw solid limited release openings for two Oscar contenders in MGM’s “American Fiction” and A24’s “The Zone of Interest,” but it was Fathom Events that got the biggest success with Angel Studios’ “Christmas With the Chosen: Holy Night,” a Christian limited engagement release that is capping off a record year for the event screening company.

“Holy Night” is a sequel to the 2021 “Christmas With the Chosen” holiday special for Angel Studios’ hit indie streaming series about Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel. The special set opening day records for Fathom and grossed $13.7 million during its limited engagement.

“Holy Night” isn’t showing quite as strong a start with $4.6 million grossed from 2,094 theaters since its release this past Tuesday, but that is enough to put Fathom’s annual gross total for 2023 at approximately $97 million, the highest ever in the history of the company.

Partnerships with indie companies like Angel Studios and Studio Ghibli distributor GKIDS have helped Fathom expand its slate of offerings to a more diverse array of specialty audiences, with some films forgoing the limited engagement model for longer theatrical runs. Meanwhile, theaters have shown greater interest in screening Fathom limited engagement releases as a way to improve audience turnout on weekends where major studios aren’t releasing top films.

“Going into this year, we saw a need to make some changes to the business model we had employed pre-pandemic, so we drew up some innovative ideas and put them into play,” Ray Nutt, CEO of Fathom Events, said in a statement earlier this week. “We couldn’t be more proud of our contribution to the industry this year and could not be happier about how this new model performed.”

Elsewhere, MGM released Cord Jefferson’s satire “American Fiction” in seven theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, grossing $227,000 for a per theater average of $32,411. The film will expand to 40 theaters in 11 cities for Christmas weekend as it hopes to build up audience buzz ahead of the Golden Globes ceremony and Oscar nominations next month.

“American Fiction” stars Jeffrey Wright as a brilliant but struggling academic and writer who, in a swipe against the stereotypical crime-riddled narratives about Black people that flood pop culture, writes his own novel filled with gang violence, missing fathers and bloodshed. To his shock, the novel becomes a hit, forcing him to pretend that he is an anonymous ex-convict to close the book sale and pay for treatment for his dementia-stricken mother.

“American Fiction” won the coveted audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, an award that has led to at least a Best Picture Oscar nomination for 14 of its last 15 winners. Critics have also praised the film, giving it a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score.

Another critically acclaimed film that hit theaters is Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” an austere, sobering drama focused on the family of Rudolf Hoss, a top Nazi commandant at Auschwitz, as they live an idyllic life right next door to the Holocaust.

“The Zone of Interest” will run in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles before expanding wide in January. The film grossed $124,800 this weekend for a per theater average of $31,200. The film, which is Glazer’s first in a decade, won the Grand Prix at Cannes and sports a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score.

Among holdovers, Searchlight’s “Poor Things” expanded to 82 theaters and grossed $1.3 million this weekend for a total of $2.2 million. Searchlight will expand the film to approximately 800 theaters for Christmas weekend.

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