Thanksgiving Comes Early to Box Office : Movies: Three releases score big, but insiders worry that Christmas glut may confront filmgoers with too many choices.

The smash business for Paramount Pictures’ “The Addams Family” over the weekend may have given new meaning to Thanksgiving for hit-hungry Hollywood. But the unsettled question remains: Will the box-office feast continue?

After more than three months of depressed box-office tallies, the movie industry was buoyed on Monday by the $24.2 million in ticket sales for “The Addams Family,” plus the continued strength of Universal Pictures’ “Cape Fear” and the strong showing of Walt Disney Pictures’ “Beauty and the Beast,” which moved into wide release on 1,000 screens.

While movie grosses for the year remain slightly off 1990’s pace--the second best on record--the combined grosses for the Top 10 movies over the weekend were estimated to be about $55 million, compared to $51 million for the same weekend-before Thanksgiving a year ago.

“The moviegoers are back,” said John Krier, owner of Exhibitor Relations, a company that tracks box-office figures. “When you get grosses like these, it shows there’s an appetite for movies and it gets the public talking. Now, there are two or three films to talk about.”

But others are concerned that the proliferation of films during the Christmas season may take its toll as moviegoers are confronted with so many choices.

“We have long had ‘The Addams Family’ scheduled for November, because we felt it was proper to establish it in the marketplace before the Christmas crunch,” said Paramount’s Motion Picture Group President Barry London. Likewise, that is the studio’s strategy for opening “Star Trek VI” on Dec. 6, London said.

The idea is to come out before such other holiday season heavyweight films as “Hook,” Steven Spielberg’s retelling of the Peter Pan story starring Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams (opening Dec. 11), and Barbra Steisand’s “The Prince of Tides” (opening Dec. 18).

Success is less predictable for several other films, according to some insiders. Among them are “My Girl,” which stars last year’s Christmas season champ Macaulay Culkin and opens Wednesday; “Father of the Bride,” starring Steve Martin (opening Dec. 20 ); and “For the Boys,” the Bette Midler-James Caan film that opened last weekend and goes into wider release this week. (In two theaters, “For the Boys,” brought in a relatively healthy $71,348.)

“There will be a little bit of a crunch during December, but the pictures are spread out well,” said Philip Garfinkle, senior vice president of Entertainment Data Inc., a company that provides box-office information.

With the exception of Martin Scorsese’s suspense thriller “Cape Fear,” which ranked No. 2 for the weekend, the kinds of movies playing to the best business are family-oriented titles, such as the “The Addams Family,” third-ranked “Beauty and the Beast” and fifth-ranked “Curly Sue,” which is in its fifth week of release, with box-office receipts of more than $25 million to date.

The strong opening for the ghoulish “Addams Family,” based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons and the ‘60s TV sitcom that grew out of them, meant that it’s appealing to a family base, said Paramount. “Yes, it is a family film, even if it is a strangely unorthodox family,” London said.

The audience for “Addams” is split about evenly between men and women and between those above and below 25, London claimed. “It matches the 1990 U.S. Census and plays to all segments of the population.”

“We are very excited by what has happened for the weekend and believe this bodes well for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend,” London added. “It’s a positive sign for the movie business.”

Like the rest of Hollywood’s major studios, Paramount has had a dry spell at the box office, broken only by “The Naked Gun 2 1/2” which opened June 28 and did $87 million worth of business; the studio’s late-summer hit “Dead Again” sold about $40 million in tickets.

The $24.2 million worth of tickets sold by “The Addams Family” on Friday, Saturday and Sunday marked the largest industry opening weekend since last summer’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which did $52 million over the five-day Fourth of July weekend. But industry sources said a better comparison would be to last June’s non-holiday Friday-Saturday-Sunday opening for “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” which brought in $25.6 million.

After third-ranked “Beauty and the Beast” on last weekend’s chart, there was a sharp fall-off in grosses. Steven Spielberg’s animated “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,” hardly made a splash with moviegoers.

Weekend Box Office

Weekend Gross/ Screens/ Weeks in Movie (Studio) Total (millions) Average Release 1. “The Addams Family” $24.2 2,411 1 (Paramount) $24.2 $10,039 2. “Cape Fear” $10 1,702 2 (Universal) $24.2 $5,895 3. “Beauty and the Beast” $9.6 977 2 (Disney) $9.9 $9,851 4. “American Tail” $3.4 1,680 1 (Universal) $3.4 $2,045 5. “Curly Sue” $2.4 1,634 5 (Warner Bros.) $25.8 $1,454

SOURCE: Exhibitor Relations Co.