The Wild Robot opens at the top of the box office
The Wild Robot soars while Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis flops in its opening weekend
Family-friendly movies continue to save the box office this year. After the massive mega-hit that was Inside Out 2, this weekend’s number one film is another animated kids’ movie, The Wild Robot. The DreamWorks flick, which stars Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames, raked in $35 million in its opening weekend.
It’s not the massive haul ($62 million) that Inside Out 2 made in its debut, but The Wild Robot deserves a little credit after a summer where most of the biggest hits were so-called “established IP.” (Per Box Office Mojo, nine out of the 10 most lucrative films of 2024 so far were sequels or series.) Deadline, always good for an esoteric fun fact, reports that The Wild Robot achieved “the third best opening for an animated movie in September.” Another fun fact: with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bumped to number two, Catherine O’Hara currently has the two biggest movies at the box office, which feels truly right and just.
Elsewhere in the weekend’s debuts, the Indian action drama Deavara Part One (starring RRR‘s N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) debuted at number four at the box office with $5.6 million. This is particularly notable because it came out way ahead of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which opened to $4 million. According to Variety, Megalopolis played in 1,854 North American theaters, while Deavara Part One was showing at just 1,040. Unfortunately, whatever morbid curiosity exists surrounding Coppola’s bizarre self-funded epic didn’t translate to ticket sales, despite the auteur’s big push for IMAX theaters. See below for the weekend’s top 10 at the box office, via Box Office Mojo.
- The Wild Robot, $35 million
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, $16.04 million
- Transformers One, $9.3 million
- Devara Part One, $5.6 million
- Speak No Evil, $4.3 million
- Megalopolis, $4 million
- Deadpool & Wolverine, $2.66 million
- My Old Ass, $2.22 million
- Never Let Go, $2.2 million
- The Substance, $1.81 million