The winner

Ending Les Miserables' impressive four-week reign at the chart summit, Wreck-It Ralph smashes its way to the top of the UK box office with a robust £4.53m, the biggest three-day tally for an animated feature since Ice Age 4 last July. Among other recent animations, Madagascar 3 posted a bigger opening number, but its £6.03m debut included £2.39m in previews. Similarly, Brave's first weekend of wide play (£5.27m) included significant previews (£2.67m).

While Wreck-It Ralph's US opening of $49.1m last November represented the highest ever for Walt Disney Animation Studios, the UK result can't quite make an equivalent claim, since Tangled debuted here in January 2011 with £5.11m. Disney-owned Pixar, of course, has achieved even bigger numbers. Disney scored some big PR wins with visiting voice cast members Sarah Silverman and John C Reilly, including appearances with Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross, Radio 1, Radio 2 and a Bafta awards presenting gig for the pair of them.

The Brit hit

Equal parts celebration and relief are presumably the order of the day at the London offices of distributor StudioCanal, with news that their comedy I Give It a Year landed in third place, with a solid £1.45m from 396 sites, delivering a £3,662 average. That number is hardly up there with previous Working Title-produced British romcoms, but it's a solid start for a film that always represented a risk. From debut director Dan Mazer, and starring two actors in the lead roles (Rafe Spall and Rose Byrne) who had never opened a movie, the outcome was hard to predict. StudioCanal opted for an ensemble marketing image, which is unusual for a romcom, but not unprecedented, and was in fact the path chosen for one of the genre's biggest ever hits, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The comparison is somewhat apt as lead actor Hugh Grant was a similarly unproven box-office commodity at the time.

Spall had previously featured in several Working Title films – Shaun of the Dead and Orlando Bloom flop The Calcium Kid in 2004, and Hot Fuzz in 2007 – but he was not a marketable element in those pictures, and it's hard to imagine the actor was top of the company's wishlist for I Give It a Year. Assuming Mazer's film enjoys a reasonably sustained run with UK audiences, more lead roles should follow. Sydney-born Byrne, who previously delivered memorable supporting work in Hollywood comedies Get Him to the Greek and Bridesmaids, should likewise rise up the lists of leading ladies.

I Give It a Year landed convincingly ahead of rival wide release Warm Bodies, which notched up £896,000 from 315 screens, for sixth place. The comedic zombie romance should play nicely in the coming half-term school holiday.

The disappointment

The intense competition of the awards race has already seen two contenders straggling at the back: The Sessions (£226,000 so far) and Hyde Park on Hudson (£298,000). Hitchcock, benefiting from a significantly wider release, is by no means in the same category, with an opening of £607,000, including £26,000 in previews. But a weak screen average of £1,589, disappointing critical scores (56/100 at Metacritic), and a paltry haul of actual nominations (three at Bafta and Oscar in total), all indicate that the film doesn't have the adrenaline to power its way at this ultra-competitive time. The saving grace is that the older audience may come out stronger midweek for Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, as was recently witnessed with Quartet. Distributor Twentieth Century Fox won't be too disappointed, since two of its other awards contenders sandwich Hitchcock in the top 10: Lincoln and Life of Pi. Lincoln, with £5.92m, has now overtaken rival best picture Oscar contenders Argo (£5.84m) and Silver Linings Playbook (£4.82m), while Life of Pi has a stunning £28.1m.

Insiders say audience tracking on Hitchcock was solid, and this may have encouraged the release to reach a breadth of 382 cinemas. The eventful impact of the release may have softened by being beaten to the punch by TV film The Girl, starring Toby Jones and Sienna Miller. In the US, all three of the awards-season stragglers have taken virtually identical amounts of box-office, with The Sessions on $5.93m, Hitchcock on $5.92m and Hyde Park on Hudson on $5.83m.

The modest performance of Hitchcock created an opportunity for plucky arthouse contender No, starring Gael García Bernal. The Chilean drama, recounting the anti-Pinochet campaign at the time of the 1988 referendum, achieved over £49,000 from just 15 screens (plus £8,000 in previews), including a stonking £14,455 at London's Curzon Soho. It plays a further 20 one-off showings on 12 February in the Discover Tuesdays strand at Picturehouse cinemas nationwide.

The milestones

With box-office now in excess of £33m, Les Misérables has overtaken the tallies of both Ted and Ice Age 4 over the past week, thus becoming the sixth biggest hit of the past year. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, just shy of £52m, overtook Avengers Assemble to become the third biggest, after Skyfall and The Dark Knight Rises. Django Unchained (£12.41m) has entered the top 25 for the past year, and during the week overtook both Inglourious Basterds (£10.93m) and Kill Bill Vol 1 (£11.67m) to become Quentin Tarantino's second biggest UK box-office hit, just behind Pulp Fiction (£12.65m). Measured by admissions, of course, it would be a different story.

Game over

For the previous 16 weeks, UK box office had been up on year-ago equivalent frames, a winning streak that is almost certainly unparalleled since accurate reporting began. Now, at last, takings dip v the year-prior weekend, albeit by a modest 2%. The market may have been buoyed by the arrival of several new releases, notably Wreck-It Ralph, but these weren't quite as strong as the combined might of The Woman in Black, The Muppets, The Vow and the 3D reissue of The Phantom Menace, which landed in the top four places on the second February weekend of 2012.

The future

With Valentine's Day falling on a Thursday, most of this weekend's major new releases arrive in cinemas ahead of the traditional Friday, including Knocked Up spinoff This Is 40 and action sequel A Good Day to Die Hard. Beautiful Creatures, adapted from the young adult novel by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, steals a march by landing on Wednesday. Animation Sammy's Great Escape, which has already enjoyed some modest previews, targets families with young children. Baz Luhrmann classics Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge both play cinemas nationwide for Valentine's Day only. Run for Your Wife, from the Ray Cooney hit comedy stageplay, aims to entice audiences with a cast including Danny Dyer, Denise van Outen, Sarah Harding and Neil Morrissey.

Top 10 films

1. Wreck-It Ralph, £4,526,380 from 501 sites (New)

2. Les Misérables, £1,640,857 from 514 sites. Total: £33,456,340

3. I Give It a Year, £1,450,023 from 396 sites (New)

4. Django Unchained, £1,073,775 from 404 sites. Total: £12,407,764

5. Flight, £925,049 from 387 sites. Total: £3,186,967

6. Warm Bodies, £895,509 from 315 sites (New)

7. Lincoln, £809,196 from 434 sites. Total: £5,916,579

8. Hitchcock, £606,817 from 382 sites (New)

9. Life of Pi, £462,559 from 316 sites. Total: £28,098,112

10. The Impossible, £351,193 from 263 sites. Total: £12,751,395

Other openers

Special 26, 44 sites, £107,520

No, 15 sites, £49,277 (+ £8,038 previews)

I Wish, 7 sites, £18,484 (+ £1,979 previews)

Suspects in Love, 18 sites, £14,855

Hukumet Kadin, 1 site, £7,472

Mirchi, 4 sites, £3,591

A Liar's Autobiography, 3 sites, £2,949 (+ £3,756 previews)

Sajjan: The Real Friend, 5 sites, £2,119