Hello, dear readers. Or, rather, “Bello! Papaya Dua Lipa gelato big bosses!” At long last, Pierre Coffin’s Minions & Monsters — surely the biggest one-eyed monster featuring Universal blockbuster releasing this July — is here, marking the staggering seventh overall outing for everybody’s favourite outsized-tic-tac-looking, narna obsessed, evil-worshipping little guys. But despite being a hit with critics and landing as top banana at the box office in its opening weekend, the Minions’ Classic Hollywood caper and its $159.8 million global haul isn’t quite the summer success story Illumination’s top brass would’ve been hoping for.
Per Variety‘s reporting, Coffin’s latest entry in the Despicable Me Cinematic Universe (or DMCU, as nobody has ever called it), marks a franchise-lowest opening weekend for the series, having taken just $61 million stateside since previews started last Wednesday. Across the actual 4th July weekend itself, Minions & Monsters actually took a mere $36 million, which is $20 million less than the first Despicable Me‘s first frame haul and way off the pace of Minions: The Rise Of Gru and Despicable Me 4, which bowed to $123 million and $122 million respectively when they launched. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as not only does Illumination’s animated monster movie have that incredibly positive critical and word-of-mouth response swinging in its favour (and it really is very good, even for the Minion-agnostic), but also the Minions’ adventures have traditionally tended to demonstrate real staying power at the box office — so a Hot Minion Summer is still very much on.
Minions & Monster‘s underperformance follows a nervy couple of weeks at the global box office following the flop of DC Studios’ Supergirl, which has sadly suffered a damning 74% drop-off in ticket sales in just its second week. Sure, Toy Story 5 has done as expected and continued to ride like the wind in its third weekend, cruising past the $750 million box-office milestone with considerable ease. But still, all eyes will now be on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day to see if the big guns have the firepower to bring the masses out of the next heatwave and into the multiplex. We have a sneaking suspicion they may do just fine….
