Box office: Minions, Baby Driver win but House loses
LOS ANGELES — The Minions are still a box office force and original stories are scoring big, but not the R-rated comedy — even with Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler behind it.
Universal Pictures and Illumination’s Despicable Me 3 earned an estimated $75.4 million US over the weekend, while the former Saturday Night Live stars’ gambling comedy The House burned down.
Featuring the voices of Steve Carell and Trey Parker, Despicable Me 3 easily topped the holiday weekend charts from 4,529 theatres in North America. While it’s a far cry from Minions’ $115 million launch in 2015, and also lower than Despicable Me 2, which opened to $83.5 million in 2013, Nick Carpou, president of Domestic Theatrical Distribution for Universal Pictures, says it’s a number to celebrate.
Edgar Wright’s original heist movie Baby Driver coasted to $30 million in its first five days in theatres, with $21 million from the three-day weekend to take second place. Sony Pictures released the R-rated pic, which stars Jamie Foxx, Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm and Kevin Spacey and cost a reported $34 million to produce. “How great it is to see audiences turn out to support original filmmaking,” said Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution.
The R-rated film did well with critics and is one of a handful of original or independent films this weekend that are notable successes. Sofia Coppola’s R-rated Civil War-set film The Beguiled scored in its expansion from four to 674 theatres in its second weekend. It earned $3.3 million to take eighth place and bested franchise fare including The Mummy and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which were both playing in more than 1,670 theatres.
The well-reviewed romantic comedy The Big Sick also did good business in its expansion to 71 locations, earning $1.7 million.
“Perhaps this is the summer where Hollywood finally starts emulating the small-screen model of creating compelling original content in order to generate goodwill with audiences who have more options than ever before,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst for comScore.
Rounding out the top five were holdovers Transformers: The Last Knight in third with $17 million, followed by Wonder Woman with $15.6 million and Cars 3 with $9.5 million.
Not so successful was suburban gambling comedy The House, which landed in sixth place with only $9 million. “The R-rated comedy used to be the antidote to the typical summer blockbuster and now those films are having a tough time,” said Dergarabedian. “Now people feel like they’ve seen that movie before when they watch the trailer.”