Battle at the Box Office 7/4/22
There are still plenty of Minions fans out there as Minions: The Rise of Gru cruised to a massive victory over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
The Rise of Gru took in $108.5 million over the weekend with an estimated total of $127.9 million including today’s holiday. It’s the second best opening of the Despicable Me franchise behind the first Minions and way up from the opening of Despicable Me 3 in 2017, which made $72.4 million on its opening weekend. It’s also the second-best opening in general for Illumination, again behind the first Minions movie, and also the third biggest opening for Independence Day weekend, behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Worldwide, The Rise of Gru has $221.6 million and is just outside the top 10 worldwide for the year. It has hit the top 10 domestically at #7.
Top Gun: Maverick remained strong in second place with another $25.5 million. It has over $564 million domestic and now over $1.1 billion worldwide. Talking all-time box office, it is now the 12th highest grossing film domestically of all time unadjusted for inflation and 34th adjusted for inflation. It is #30 on the all-time worldwide box office charts.
Elvis dropped to third but only dropped 39% from last week’s opening with another $19 million. It has $67.3 million domestically so far for two weeks out and $113.5 million worldwide.
Jurassic World: Dominion and The Black Phone rounded out the top 5, with The Black Phone dropping 48% from last week’s opening and taking in another $12.3 million for $47.4 million domestically while Dominion has over $331 million domestic and just over $828 million worldwide.
Lightyear had another steep dropoff and fell out of the top 5 in its third week of release, taking in $6.5 million and putting it at $105.3 million domestic. It may be able to beat The Good Dinosaur’s $123 million domestic but, if it doesn’t, it will be the worst-performing Pixar movie domestically (Onward doesn’t count as it barely had a theatrical release in 2020 before theaters completely shut down for the pandemic).
The other new release besides Minions was Mr. Malcolm’s List, which couldn’t crack even $1 million in 1,384 theaters. Some predictions were thinking it could make at least double that and it might have been a bit of a miscalculation for Bleeker Street to put a movie that small in a somewhat large number of theaters all at once instead of doing a more slow roll-out.
Minions: The Rise of Gru all took the Per Theater average as well with $24,712 in each of the 4,391 theaters it was playing in over the weekend.