LOS ANGELES – The minions ran away with the box office for the second week in a row.
With $44.8 million in domestic ticket sales Friday through Sunday, the animated sequel Despicable Me 2 outdid the debuts of the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2 and director Guillermo del Toro’s monsters-versus-robots action flick Pacific Rim.
The weekend’s No. 1 movie featuring Steve Carell as ex-supervillain Gru made another $55.5 million overseas. That brought its global two-week total to $472.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Grown Ups 2 was Sandler’s second-best movie opening of his career with $42.5 million in sales in the U.S. and Canada (His best domestic opening was The Longest Yard from 2005 with $58.6 million over four days). Overseas, the comedy brought in $1.7 million.
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The movie brings together former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal as a bumbling police officer with a host of comedy stars including Chris Rock and David Spade playing awkward parents.
The third-place finish of Pacific Rim, with $38.3 million in receipts, represented a disappointing start domestically but studio figures showed it doing better overseas.
The movie took in $53 million from 38 markets outside the U.S. and Canada, representing about half its overseas footprint. It has yet to open in China or Japan, the home of the movie’s co-star, Rinko Kikuchi.
The made-in-Toronto movie had an estimated production budget of $185 million, not including the millions spent on marketing, so there is still the opportunity for it to make its money back.
Fizziology, a company that tracks buzz on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, said that 82 per cent of posts on Pacific Rim were positive ahead of the opening, with only 6 per cent negative as some people drew negative comparisons to the Power Rangers or Godzilla. The film draws heavily on Japan’s Kaiju movie monster tradition.
Fizziology President Ben Carlson said the appeal of Pacific Rim to 3-D moviegoers and the fact it is one of the most-hyped films of the summer could help it with Asian audiences, he said.
“This movie’s really pre-wired to do well in those territories,” he said.
The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto, took in $11.1 million domestically in its second week, falling into fifth place behind The Heat starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, which brought in another $14 million in its third week.
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