Not only does that number mean Finding Dory is going to boost summer box office sales big time, but it would also be the biggest opening weekend for a Pixar film.
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The team behind Finding Dory found it “tricky” to strike the right balance between using new visual technology while maintaining the look of the original film. Pixar continues to produce some marvelous, out-of-the-box movies – Inside Out, the underrated courageous – but Finding Dory joins a growing number of misfires, including The Good Dinosaur and Monsters University, that suggest the studio’s golden era might be behind it. The highest amount ever grossed by an animated film is 2007’s “Shrek The Third”, which amassed $121.6 million, an amount “Minions” just fell short of past year when it took $115.7 million.
Did Finding Nemo really need a sequel?
One of the most impressive aspects of “Finding Dory” is the way in which it celebrates those who are differently-abled.
Flash forward a year and, after the events of Finding Nemo, Dory has formed a happy family of sorts with Marlin and his son (Hayden Rolence) until some flashbacks to fragmented childhood memories have her seeking a parental reunion of her own.
“Finding Dory’s” reviews, while impressive, haven’t been as overwhelmingly stellar as its predecessor, but that shouldn’t stop it taking in a huge amount over the next few weeks. The first 15-ish minutes of the movie sums up Dory’s life up until she crashed into Marlin (Albert Brooks) in the original movie. Her uncharacteristic burst of memory leads her back to her ancestral home: a marine life institute in California that’s like a nonprofit, rehabilitation-focused SeaWorld. It would have been very easy to have made Finding Nemo 2, focusing again on the young clownfish as he explores the wonders of the deep but shifting the focus keeps everything as fresh and vibrant as its surroundings. The new film opens with Dory’s back story.
It’s remarkable that he’d even attempt it, and even more remarkable that it would turn out as well as it has.
For that, you can thank Finding Dory’s title character-a royal blue tang with Memento-style short-term memory loss, voiced winningly once again by Ellen DeGeneres.
On Dory’s journey to find her mom (Diane Keaton) and dad (Eugene Levy), she meets Hank (Ed O’Neill), a testy octopus and escape artist; Bailey (Ty Burrell), an overdramatic beluga whale; and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a nearsighted whale shark. As Marlin and Nemo search for their friend, they stop trying to think their way and ask themselves, “What would Dory do?” But it’s not a simple switch in perspective: In seeing through her forgetful fisheyes, you realize how terrifyingly disorienting it is to be Dory.
While we agree that this film is about a fish who can read English and an octopus that can stay on land as much he wants, the end portions do make you stretch your imagination to the point of disbelief.
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“I forget. It’s what I do best”, Dory says.
