Weekend Box Office: Incredibles 2 soars with the biggest animated opening of all time
Here’s a headline that may induce some déjà vu: Over the weekend, The Incredibles 2, Pixar’s 14-years-later sequel to Brad Bird’s Oscar-winning superhero family adventure, set a new record for the biggest opening weekend of all time (for an animated film). If it’s hard to tell which records mean something anymore, we don’t blame you: It seems like every week we report on a sequel breaking a record set by another sequel. But, for what it’s worth, this is a big one, big enough to vault The Incredibles 2 to No. 8 on the list of the top 10 biggest openings of all time—in any genre.
It also easily bested the previous record-holder, Finding Dory, making $180 million to Finding Dory’s $135 million. It wowed audiences with an A+ CinemaScore, and triumphed by our favorite alternate metric, the per-screen average, with a $40,816 average that more than doubled its closest competitor. That would be factory farming documentary Eating Animals, which crammed $17,608 worth of vegan farts into each of its two screens over the weekend. (Also on the documentary front, the Mr. Rogers biography/plea for kindness Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is also picking up steam in its second week, adding 67 screens at $10,260 each and jumping from No. 19 to No. 15 in the process.)
Aside from all things incredible, it was a pretty quiet weekend. Befitting its middling reviews, Tag opened at third place with a respectable but not great $14.6 million, lagging behind the No. 2 movie in America, Ocean’s 8, which pulled in $19.5 million. Also dropping this weekend was Hereditary, which fell from No. 4 to No. 6 with $7 million and a marshmallow-soft $2,344 per-screen average, presumably the result of all that bad word of mouth we discussed last week. Not that it matters; the $27 million the film has already made domestically is more than double its reported $10 million production budget.
But the biggest losers this week were a couple of kingpins, SuperFly and Gotti, both of which opened with a splat at No. 7 and No. 12, respectively. That’s not much of a surprise, considering SuperFly was, by and large, a nonstarter in terms of buzz before its opening. But things could be worse for the blaxploitation remake: It could be Gotti, which has been the recipient of the wrong kind of buzz with headlines like Mashable’s “Gotti Has a 0% On Rotten Tomatoes And The Reviews Are Priceless” and the New York Post’s “Gotti flick is the worst mob movie of all time.” And with major investor MoviePass’ own use-the-bathroom-free card accounting for 40 percent of Gotti’s already limp $1.67 million opening-weekend total, the John Travolta vehicle is looking like just another bad financial decision of many for the subscription ticket service.
For more detailed numbers, visit BoxOfficeMojo.