The Minions are their own boss, The Gallows has made back its budget 100x over, people were selfish and didn’t see Self/Less, it’s not been a good week to be a limited release, and Other Box Office News.
It was only a matter of time. They started off innocuously in 2010’s Despicable Me, cute little comic relief characters whom we all collectively agreed were the best part of that otherwise mediocre movie. Then the merchandising flood started and we happily accepted it because they were adorable. Then their involvement in the films increased exponentially with Despicable Me 2 and we cheered because Despicable Me 2 was a great film, so what’s the problem? Then those irritating Facebook memes started – useless, insincere attitude stock phrase bullsh*t that pasted random Minions onto their rubbish and called it a day – and we shook our heads in dismay but did nothing. And then it happened. Universal drowned us in marketing for the Minions spin-off movie, and you couldn’t avoid them. Everywhere you turned. Merchandise, posters, adverts, Amazon packaging. Nowhere was safe, nowhere was free. The takeover had occurred, we had to submit to our new Minion overlords for they had won. They had conquered.
Therefore, Minions opened to $115 million this past weekend, making it the second-biggest opening weekend for any animated feature ever. May God have mercy on us all.
Meanwhile, like it or not, The Gallows is actually a roaring success. Oh sure, a fifth place opening of $10 million may not seem like a success, but that’s ignoring the fact that the film allegedly only cost $100,000 to make. Such is the beauty of Blumhouse Productions, a production company that can get a horror movie made so cheaply that it is almost literally impossible for them to make a film that bombs. It’s kinda like how Uwe Boll used to be able to write off half of the budgets for his various “movies” through complicated tax breaks except, y’know, Jason Blum has actually produced a good film or two in between his crap. Plus, he quite literally has three more films coming out in the next two months, so it’s not like this mediocre performance is going to slow him down or anything.
Elsewhere, Tarsem Singh tried to bring back intellectual sci-fi with Self/Less, a film about whether it’s morally justifiable to force Ryan Reynolds to do bad things that he doesn’t want to do, as opposed to those bad things he chose to do like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Unfortunately, this is Tarsem Singh we’re talking about here, and so the director of Mirror, Mirror proceeded to apparently make a terrible movie that squanders all of its potential. Consequently, since reviews are make or break for these kind of films, the film has tanked with barely $5 million for eighth place. Dammit, people! You can’t stop the Reynoldssaince! No matter how hard you try, it won’t be stopped!
Having a similarly bad weekend was pretty much every limited release that came out this week. Doing the best of the lot was Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary examining the stereotype of the gay voice that brought in a decent $11,000 from its one screen. Next up there was Boulevard, an apparently underwhelming drama that we will all see anyway because it’s Robin Williams’ final role, with $7,000 from one screen. “Globe-trotting” comedy Meet Me In Montenegro, and I don’t need to see or hear any second of that movie after seeing the phrase “globe-trotting” used non-ironically when describing a film’s genre in 2015, did poorest with $6,000 from 10 screens for a dismal per-screen average of you work it out. All of these movies were out-performed by a re-issue of the 1992 Mel Gibson romance flick Forever Young, which took $70,000 from 14 screens for a $5,000 per-screen average. Not one part of that last sentence makes any sense to me.
This Full List, like seemingly everything else on the planet right now, is brought to you by the Minions. Give into the yellow pill-shaped fellas. Resistance is futile.
Box Office Results: Friday 10th July 2015 – Sunday 12th July 2015
1] Minions
$115,200,000 / NEW
Watched this again with a friend I hadn’t seen in years this past weekend because we got to the cinema too late to catch the first showing of Ted 2 and way too early for the next screening of Amy so had to see something, and also I am why you people are suffering so. And guess what? I still liked it! So all of you Minion haters out there can go suck something that doesn’t make this insult homophobic!
Also, Fun Fact: the animated movie with the biggest opening weekend of all-time is still Shrek the Third with $121 million because you are all far worse than I am.
$18,100,000 / $590,638,000
This will cross $600 million domestic next weekend which is quite literally insane. It is now the third highest grossing film of all-time worldwide (or it will be, since Box Office Mojo isn’t immediately up-to-date on foreign totals anymore so there may or may not be a delay), which is also insane. The backlash is insane, the extreme love is insane, the film itself is insane. It’s all just one big melting pot of insanity.
3] Inside Out
$17,108,000 / $283,638,000
Turns out that this did, in fact, beat Jurassic World when the actuals came in for the three-day weekend last week. Therefore, it is no longer the only Pixar film to not hit number 1 on the charts! Yay! After all, if this apparently amazing film couldn’t hit number 1 but Cars 2 could, then what does that say about us as a collective society?
4] Terminator: 3DS XL
$13,700,000 / $68,718,000
WOO HOO! It’s failing! It’s failing! Uh huh! Yeah! Alright! And even with foreign grosses factored in, it’s still only made $225 million against a $155 million budget! Ah, life is good, folks. Life is good.
(*suddenly remembers that the film has yet to open in China*)
Oh, hell, no. If the Terminator: Vita sequel moves ahead but the Mad Max: Fury Road one doesn’t, sh*t is going to get royally f*cked up, I am warning you right now.
5] The Gallows
$10,015,000 / NEW
Have you seen the initial trailer for this? In case you haven’t, it’s linked here, but Cliff Notes are that it’s literally just a girl sobbing for 80 seconds before being Jump Scare killed. Does that rub anyone else the wrong way? I don’t mean in the way that horror is supposed to make you uneasy, I mean in the sense that it seems more than a little exploitative and fetishizing of a woman in distress? I guess I can give it points for being honest, but still. You know. Yeah.
$9,640,000 / $48,359,000
Allow me to use this space to pay my respects to The Dissolve, real quick. A beacon of pure light and excellence in an Internet film space that seems to be in a race to the bottom, it was the film site that managed to be intellectual without coming off as snobby, diverse without looking down on mainstream film, clever and witty without coming off as snarky, proof that it was possible to write about films without having to be a closed-off academic cretin or a click-bait listicle doofus. The only real upside to this incredibly sad news is that at least the site is still up for the time being, so you can still read fine articles like Tasha Robinson’s look at how Magic Mike XXL treats female pleasure.
R.I.P. you beautiful angel. We apparently don’t deserve you, and that just isn’t goddamn fair.
7] Ted 2
$5,600,000 / $71,619,000
Saw this this past weekend. Man, I wish Seth MacFarlane would write actual jokes again.
8] Self/Less
$5,379,000 / NEW
Bummed to hear that this apparently sucks, although I will in theory get to find out for myself this week, but at least I get to inform you that The Voices is now available to buy on DVD and Blu-Ray! Seriously, go buy that damn movie.
9] Baahubali: The Beginning
$3,575,000 / NEW
I didn’t mention this in my limited release roundup for two reasons. The first is that 236 screens is really stretching the definition of “limited” for my liking. The second is that it broke on through to the top 10 so I can talk about it here instead. Plus, if I mentioned that this film managed an utterly ridiculous $15,148 per-screen average in the limited release section, then that would have discredited my headline, and I really cannot be arsed to go back and change it now. It’s late, I’m tired, let’s just push on through.
10] Max
$3,420,000 / $33,705,000
I… I really got nothing for this. This movie’s premise just makes me too sad. God knows how I’ll make it through the actual movie, I might singlehandedly put a whole load of Kleenex executives’ kids through college.
Dropped Out: Spy, San Andreas, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Dope
Callie Petch, bring it close to my lips, yeah.
Callie Petch 