Steve Carell voices Gru in Despicable Me
The world's meanest meanie got a lot of love this weekend. Universal's cartoon Despicable Me — with Steve Carell voicing Gru, the mad scientist who tries to reclaim his title as No. 1 supervillain — earned an unexpectedly burly $60 million at the North American box office, according to early studio estimates. The 3-D feature led a 3-D weekend when nearly every film, major and indie, stole the moon. This could be the first domestic weekend ever in which six movies took in more than $15 million each.
The third of the summer's animated features, after Shrek Forever Ever and Toy Story 3, and the first that isn't a sequel, D-Me attracted a huge kid audience: 55% of those attending were children under 13 and their parents. The film appealed to some crabby adults as well — it pulled an 80% rating on the review website Rotten Tomatoes — and won a straight A from CinemaScore's poll of exiting moviegoers. For flop-plagued Universal, which hadn't enjoyed an unequivocal hit since Fast and Furious 15 months ago, D-Me was a thrifty winner; its $69 million budget was only about a third of Toy Story 3's. With this successful launch of its new animation house, the company can now plan on competing with Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks and Fox.
In all the plexes, business was booming, up about 40% from the same July weekend last year (when, granted, the big debut film was Sacha Baron Cohen's ill-received Brüno, one of Universal's misfires). Except for the widely derided fantasy epic The Last Airbender, which dropped 57.5% from last weekend but still should cross the $100 million mark in its first 11 days, all the leading movies held on to most of their audience. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse saw a 48.5% dip — not bad, considering its mammoth opening frame — and after 12 days is closing in on the quarter-billion-dollar threshold. Toy Story 3, even with D-Me's baby-drain effect, was down a wee 27.3%; it has amassed $340 million at home, topping Finding Nemo as Pixar's all-time domestic moneymaker, and $213 million abroad. The securest hold was Adam Sandler's: his Grown Ups fell a negligible 14%.
The weekend's other wide release, Predators, came in third. The $25.3 million tally meant sturdy results for another frugal production: Robert Rodriguez's spiff-up of the old Arnold Schwarzenegger jungle-monster franchise cost only $40 million to produce. That smart investment for Fox was matched by returns from Cyrus, the shambling comedy with nice guy John C. Reilly as crazy guy Jonah Hill's potential stepdad. Expanding to 200 screens in its third week, Cyrus cadged $1.4 million and broke into the top 10.
Cyrus wasn't the only hit in the nano-world of indie movies. The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second of three Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson's Millennium crime best sellers, finished 11th with $965,000 at 110 theaters — a wide first-week release for a foreign-language film, and the highest per-screen average ($8,773) among the top dozen finishers, except for D-Me and Predators. But the indie gold star went to Focus Features' The Kids Are All Right, another postnuclear-family comedy starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as gay lovers whose kids are about to meet their sperm donor, Mark Ruffalo. The picture earned $505,00, claiming the 13th spot on the box office chart while playing in only seven theaters, for a year-high per-screen average of $72,143. That's not despicable. That's de-lovely.
Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Despicable Me, $60.1 million, first weekend
2. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, $33.4 million; $237 million, second week
3. Predators, $25.3 million, first weekend
4. Toy Story 3, $22 million; $340.2 million, fourth week
5. The Last Airbender, $17.15 million; $100.2 million, second week
6. Grown Ups, $16.4 million; $111.3 million, third week
7. Knight and Day, $7.85 million; $61.9 million, third week
8. The Karate Kid, $5.7 million; $164.6 million, fifth week
9. The A-Team, $1.8 million; $74 million, fifth week
10. Cyrus, $1.4 million; $3.5 million, third week
UPDATE: Distributors must have got inebriated on the weekend's good business; they overestimated the Sunday business for every one of the top 10 films. Universal's claim of $60.1 million for Despicable Me, for example, was 6.5% higher than the final figure, reported Monday, of $56.4 million. Summit's early number for Eclipse was more than 5% above the actual take. And so on. Even the top indie films had their weekend revenue hyped: The Girl Who Played With Fire actually earned $904,998, and The Kids Are All Right took in $491,971. Maybe people stayed home Sunday to watch the World Cup final; its viewership, 24.4 million, was more than the number of people who bought tickets Sunday to all movies.
The actual weekend figures for the B.O. top 10 are:
1. Despicable Me, $56.4 million
2. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, $31.7 million
3. Predators, $24.8 million
4. Toy Story 3, $21 million
5. The Last Airbender, $16.6 million
6. Grown Ups, $15.8 million
7. Knight & Day, $7.7 million
8. The Karate Kid, $5.4 million
9. The A-Team, $1.75 million
10. Cyrus, $1.3 million