Weekend box office: The Secret Life of Pets has a huge opening
Anyone that follows along with the weekend box office news knows that you should never bet against a kids movie, but even the most optimistic of pundits probably didn’t guess THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS would be flirting with $100 million on its opening weekend. That’s a huge opening for a non sequel animated film that had really simple trailers. That tells me that kids are starving for animated movies about talking animals, so expect Hollywood to jump on that craze sooner than later. The other new movie of the weekend was MIKE AND DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES and aside from the title, I assume the plot of the movie revolved around the characters trying to find Zac Effron’s shirt. But it managed to open with a respectable $17 million, which isn’t bad for that kind of movie.
Next week features what might be the biggest question mark of any summer in recent memory with the GHOSTBUSTERS reboot. There’s so much drama surrounding the film, but what’s gotten lost in all of the controversy is that the trailers for the film have been terrible. So the question is whether or not that’s because director Paul Feig misfired or because they just didn’t cut a good trailer. Early reviews have been somewhat positive, so here’s hoping the film meets expectations. With a cast that good, there’s no excuse for it not to. But even if it comes in around $50 million, I still don’t think that’s going to be good enough to beat out THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS. Note: the numbers below will be updated as they become final.
1. The Secret Life of Pets $97.6m
2. The Legend of Tarzan $20.1m
3. Finding Dory $20m
4. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates $17.1m
5. The Purge: Election Day $11.6m
6. Central Intelligence $7.9m
7. The BFG $7.9m
8. Independence Day: Resurgence $7.2m
9. The Shallows $4.6m
10. Sultan $2.8m
(Deadline)
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