“Deadpool” earned about $16.4 million in tickets, and for a four-week domestic total of $311.2 million.
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Early testing indicated that the movie would be a hit, but even Disney executives were pleasantly surprised as the film grossed nearly $75 million to surpass Frozen for the title of Disney’s largest ever opening for an animated movie.
Zootopia exceeded expectations, opening with $73.7 million to top the charts and easily pass Frozen for Disney Animation’s biggest three day debut ever. Studios are reluctant to unleash their big Oscar bait films this far before next year’s awards season, but that is hardly a deal-breaker (“Silence of the Lambs” won best picture despite a February release), and there does appear to be some unmet demand for more options.
Variety writer Brent Lang points to this resurgence as at least part of the reason for the recent success of “Zootopia” and writes that the renewed originality of Disney films owes a lot to Disney purchasing animation studio Pixar. The film debuted decently to $56,688 and a per-screen average of $14,172, so you can expect to see it expand over the new few weeks. The action fantasy movie added approximately $5 million in its second weekend to secure the fifth position. The animated film notched an additional $63.4 million over the weekend, with $24 million of it coming from Chinese theaters alone. I wasn’t expecting this one to do great and it happened, as it took in $7.6 million and one of the lower starts to a Fey movie. That makes the film the 10th highest-grossing film based off Marvel Comics domestically, slightly behind Iron Man 2 ($312.43 million). The animated animal film also set a record as the biggest March opening for an animated movie, pushing The Lorax and its $70 million into second place.
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Rounding out the Top 5 was last week’s bomb ‘Gods of Egypt’.
