Disney continued its dominance this year, winning their eleventh weekend in 2016 and grossing $136.1 domestically with Pixar’s Finding Dory, the biggest ever opening for an animated film, not adjusted for inflation. Globally, Disney owns the top three movies this year, Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, and The Jungle Book, the first two both over a billion dollars worldwide for the year.
It’s an opening comparable to the 90+% bumps both sequels in the Toy Story franchise saw over their predecessors with Dory‘s opening weekend serving as a 93.8% bump over Finding Nemo‘s $70.2 million opening back in 2003.
Dory also scored an “A” CinemaScore and played to an audience that was 45% male vs. 55% female. The age breakdown saw 65% of the audience being made up by families and 32% of the overall audience made up of children 12 and under. [BoxOfficeMojo]
Finding Dory pulled off a classic Pixar marketing coup, the ol’ “making a sequel to a movie people liked, that people also ended up liking.” Feel free to cheer Disney on for this, but be warned that if you use the phrase “Generation Nemo” I will personally stab you.
The 13 years b/w "Finding Nemo" and its sequel meant older moviegoers turned up. Disney calls them "Generation Nemo" https://t.co/eMKSwJJaet
— Erich Schwartzel (@erichschwartzel) June 19, 2016
Overshadowed but not outdone, The Rock and Kevin Hart’s Central Intelligence (“saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson”) grossed $34.5 million domestically on a $50 million budget. That one received an A- Cinemascore to go along with its 66% RottenTomatoes rating. Hart’s Will Ferrell team up, Get Hard, had a similar opening ($33 million) on the way to $90 million, though Get Hard‘s B Cinemascore and 29% RottenTomatoes rating suggest Central Intelligence should do much better.
As for last week’s releases, they all fell like slightly different-sized rocks, with The Conjuring 2, Now You See Me 2, and Warcraft dropping 61.5%, 56.9%, and 73%, respectively. Warcraft’s drop is actually “the third largest second weekend drop for a film playing in over 3,000 theaters behind 2009’s Friday the 13th (80.4%) and Fifty Shades of Grey (73.9%).”
And that’s off an opening that was disappointing to begin with. Of course, it has thus far made 90% of its total gross overseas, and the way things are going domestically that doesn’t look to change much. In any case, it’s not a bomb.
Next week brings us Matthew McConaughey fighting the Confederacy in Free State of Jones, from STX, Independence Day resurging in Independence Day: Resurgence, (for which I did not receive a screening invite, always a good sign that the studio thinks it is very good and they are very proud of it), Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, and Blake Lively’s bikini shark fight, The Shallows. That one looks good, but I am a sucker for bikini shark fights.
| Film | Weekend | Per Screen | ||
| 1 | Finding Dory | $136,183,000 | $31,634 | $136,183,000 |
| 2 | Central Intelligence | $34,500,000 | $9,835 | $34,500,000 |
| 3 | The Conjuring 2 | $15,555,000 (-61.5) | $4,635 | $71,730,000 |
| 4 | Now You See Me 2 | $9,650,000 (-56.9) | $2,986 | $41,362,000 |
| 5 | Warcraft | $6,520,000 (-73.0) |
$1,914 | $37,711,000 |
| 6 | X-Men: Apocalypse | $5,210,000 (-47.5) | $1,979 | $146,057,000 |
| 7 | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows | $5,200,000 (-63.9) | $1,685 | $71,929,000 |
| 8 | Me Before You | $4,155,000 (-54.0) | $1,571 | $46,355,000 |
| 9 | Alice Through the Looking Glass | $3,615,000 (-36.0) | $1,601 | $69,318,000 |
| 10 | Captain America: Civil War | $2,296,000 (-46.8) | $1,601 | $401,277,000 |