Hobbit gives NZ director Peter Jackson a Boxing Day full house - Sydney Morning Herald

The Hobbit 2 Photo: Supplied

Peter Jackson has confirmed his position as Lord of the Ringing Tills with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug recording the second-highest Boxing Day opening in Australian history.

The only film to have topped the $5.465 million the second film in his Hobbit trilogy racked up at the Australian box office on Thursday is the first part, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which opened with $5.9 million last year.

Jackson holds the top five places on the Boxing Day chart, with his three Lord of the Rings films filling out the next three positions.

Australian fans were, however, made to wait for their chance to see the New Zealander's latest J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation. But they're used to that: his films are typically released here close to a fortnight after they hit cinemas in most other territories of the world, in order to capitalise on the biggest day on the Australian film calendar.

Jackson has come a long way since his first feature, the ultra-low-budget sci-fi horror comedy Bad Taste. Shot on weekends over four years, with Jackson playing a couple of characters and his close mates the rest, the film cost an estimated $NZ25,000 to shoot (a further $NZ235,000 was stumped up by the New Zealand Film Commission to get it cinema-ready).

By contrast, The Hobbit trilogy is estimated to have so far cost about $560 million to make (post-production on the final instalment, The Hobbit: There and Back, is ongoing).

In one respect, though, nothing has changed. Bad Taste was released in New Zealand on December 11, 1987, while The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was released there on December 12.

In Australia, all but one of Jackson's films since the first Lord of the Rings have opened on Boxing Day (King Kong opened on December 14, 2005). Few countries have to wait longer. But the ends clearly justify the means.

The record haul for the first part of The Hobbit trilogy last year helped create a single-day box office record in Australia of $10.8 million (Les Miserables, Wreck It Ralph, Parental Guidance and Skyfall all did their bit to get it there). That figure also included films that were screening before Boxing Day, but the appetite for something new was borne out by the fact that the seven films released on that day accounted for $9.7 million of that total.

The result this year fell just short of that, with a total haul of $10 million.

Opening on Boxing Day isn't a guarantee of success for any one film, but having fresh content on the day is crucial to the cinema business overall.

Movies that open on Boxing Day have, since 2000, accounted for an average 7.7 per cent of the annual box office in Australia - a huge haul when you consider that they account for between 1 and 2 per cent of all films released in a year.