Rian Johnson's modern-day whodunit is getting away with murder at the box office, writes Charles Gant in his weekly bulletin

The winner: Frozen II

Having debuted with a mightily impressive £15.1m the previous weekend, it’s no great surprise to see Frozen II hang on to the top spot of the UK box office for a second week. Declining 42% in its second session, the Disney sequel has now grossed £27.3m after 10 days. Toy Story 4, the biggest animated hit so far this year (unless you count Disney’s allegedly live action, but CG-generated The Lion King), stood at £27.0m at the same stage of release. Frozen II has three weekends of play ahead of it before Christmas, all of which should be robust for the film, and it should go on to perform well until kids return to school in January.

Globally, Frozen II stands at $739m after just two weekends of play, including $124m in North America for the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The sequel looks on course to match the original Frozen’s global tally of $1.27bn – the biggest haul of all time for an animated film (unless you count the Lion King remake).

The runner-up: Knives Out

Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson made a bold move when he decided to revive the whodunit murder mystery with his new film Knives Out – the genre has been relatively moribund in recent years. True, there was Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, but that film relied on a famous slice of intellectual property by Agatha Christie. Knives Out is a wholly original piece of IP.