Let the celebrations begin.
The extended July 4th holiday weekend is turning into a feast for Hollywood, with the release of Minions: The Movie. According to early predictions, The Rise of Gru will gross $129.2 million in its first four days in the United States. This comprises a total of $109.5 million over the three days. (Some competitors believe it might reach $140 million by the end of Monday.)
Overseas, the film will have earned more than $86 million by Sunday, for a total global haul of more than $200 million.
Without accounting for inflation, the Illumination and Universal movie will have one of the strongest openings ever for a Hollywood animated tentpole in the US. Forget about leaving markings from the epidemic era in your family photo.
The total take on Friday was roughly $48 million from 4,400 locations, with a sizable $10.8 million going to previews.
The performance of the film is important because it proves that parents and younger children are eager to return in droves to the cinema. Animation has been viewed as a hampered genre throughout the epidemic. It didn’t help that the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear from Pixar and Disney debuted to a meager $51 million last month before suffering a sharp decline in its second outing although Lightyear reached a milestone on Friday by crossing the $100 million mark domestically.
With $72 million in its first weekend, Paramount’s live-action/CGI hybrid Sonic the Hedgehog 2 previously held the record for the highest PG family debut of all time.
For the same four-day holiday weekend, Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) made $115.9 million in Hollywood, followed by Spider-Man 2 ($115.8 million) and Despicable Me 3 ($99 million). If predictions come true, Minions 2 will undoubtedly come in first. Since the Fourth of July fell in the middle of the week in 2017, some people think Spider-Man: Homecoming qualifies as a July 4th entry. However, this comparison isn’t fair because Homecoming launched on the July 7-9 weekend to $117 million domestically.
Another noteworthy development is that overall weekend revenue will actually be above that of the same time period in 2019 as the box office recovery continues to gather momentum. Another part of the advantage is holdovers, like Top Gun: Maverick.
The Rise of Gru is the fifth installment in the Despicable Me franchise, which is the highest-grossing animated series in history, not accounting for inflation. It is a follow-up to 2015’s Minions.
