Weekend Box Office: The Lion King continues Disney's trend of humongous opening weekends
While the newest, CGI iteration of the classic tale might not have been everyone’s cup of tea, The Lion King still had all the trappings of a wildly successful opening weekend. With nothing in its path and some well-curated buzz that only Beyoncé herself could manage, the lifelike reboot spent the weekend essentially filling bags with cash – $190 million domestically, to be exact. According to Forbes, this equates to the biggest opening for an animated film of all time, as well as the biggest opener every for the month of July, sans inflation. It’s also the second biggest opening of the year, behind Avengers: Endgame. Sometimes fur technology (very expensive fur technology, rather) works.
Following Simba and his friends is Peter Parker And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Shitty Trip Abroad. In it’s third weekend, Spider-Man: Far From Home is holding steadily at second place with a $21 million haul as it begins to shed some of its screens. (If you remember, it had the widest domestic opening with 4,634 screens. The Lion King also managed to beat that with 4,725 screens, because why show mercy?) Following in third is Toy Story 4, which is still hanging on after five weeks while bringing its total gross to $375.5 million to-date. Rounding out the Top Five are Crawl and Yesterday, earning $6 million and $5.1 million, respectively.
While Endgame is no longer in the Top 10, it still managed to cross over the finish line this weekend in the race to beat Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time, which you only really care about for the potentially petty response from James Cameron. In the end, Cameron and the Russo Brothers had a perfectly respectable exchange about the feat, with Cameron extending a warm congratulations to the celebrated duo. That’s either good or bad news, depending on your position in the matter. Either way, Disney comes out on top, and we imagine we’ll have to say that a lot in the future, given the current trajectory of major feature releases.
For more detailed information about this weekend’s box office, check out Box Office Mojo!