It’s been 13 years in the making but, Finding Dory has certainly made a huge splash in theaters this weekend as the highly anticipated animated film broke box office records in its opening weekend. The 2007 film “Shrek the Third” was the record-holder with a $121.6 million debut.
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“Finding Dory” also scored the biggest domestic debut ever for an animated film when not adjusted for inflation.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart’s buddy comedy Central Intelligence was the other new release of the weekend.
“I suffer from short-term memory loss”, a younger version of the titular fish (voiced by Sloane Murray) is taught to say by her parents, voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton.
Overseas, Finding Dory added another $US50 million to its haul from 29 worldwide markets, including Australia, Argentina, Russia and China, where its $17.5 million debut ranks as the biggest ever for a Pixar release. Warcraft, too, is buoyed somewhat by its foreign ticket sales, but here, the $160 million epic brought in an estimated $6.5 million and $37.7 million in domestic gross.
In the meantime, just keep swimming, Dory – all the way to the bank.
The movie earned an 11th weekend at the top of the North American box office for Disney, which owns Pixar and was behind the three top-grossing 2016 films so far – “Zootopia”, “Captain America: Civil War” and “The Jungle Book”.
Directed by Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane, the follow-up sees Finding Nemo voice stars Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks returning to voice the roles of Dory and Marlin, respectively.
“Finding Dory” is poised to handily surpass that amount. The movie has also received fantastic reviews over the past few months.
Dory has also swam past fellow Pixar creation “Toy Story 3” which came out in 2010 to a $110.3 million premiere, thus becoming the studio’s biggest success to date.
“In a amusing way, the 13-year separation between the first and second movie was serendipitous”, said Disney domestic distribution chief Dave Hollis.
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“The Conjuring 2” drops from first place to third place, taking in $15.5 million over the weekend.
