A little animated dog is hoping to take a big bite out of the box office this week.
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The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgard and Margot Robbie, clung to number two for the second straight week, making US$21.6 million.
Fox’s R-rated comedy “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” started off modestly with $1.6 million in 2,560 locations.
The new movie brought in $103.17 million for its first three days, surpassing the $90.4 million made by last year’s Inside Out. Long live The Secret Life of Pets.
It was quite a weekend for animated movies.
The movie – featuring the voices of Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart, Steve Coogan, Louis CK and Ellie Kemper – follows the success of Zootopia and Finding Dory. “Despicable Me” helmer Chris Renaud directs and Yarrow Cheney co-directs from a script by Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch. The tally quintuples that of the week’s next-best performer.
“Pets” is by far the biggest opening of the year for Universal, which has seen only middling performance in 2016 after a record-setting 2015.
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Illumination Entertainment has produced four other animated features, including the widely successful “Minions”, which garnered more than $1.15 billion during its run at the box office past year. That doesn’t just make it the highest-grossing movie of the summer (jumping passed fellow Disney title “Captain America: Civil War”), but it’s also now the highest grossing Disney (and Pixar) animated film of all time at the domestic box office, topping the combined original and rerelease gross of “The Lion King” (2.7 million).
