Box Office Week: Despicable Me 3 opens at #1 with a lower than expected $75.4M, Baby Driver is the biggest Edgar Wright opening weekend at #2 with $21M, The House flops opening at #6 with $9M, and Wonder Woman becomes the highest domestic grossing DCEU film with $346.6M and passes $700M worldwide.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Despicable Me 3	$75,410,275	$192,310,275	1
2	Baby Driver	$21,000,000	$36,829,105	1
3	Transformers: The Last Knight	$17,000,000	$429,903,351	2
4	Wonder Woman	$16,100,000	$708,444,475	5
5	Cars 3	$9,524,000	$173,814,099	3

Notable Box Office Stories:

• Openings like the one had by Despicable Me 3 are hard to qualify, because mild disappointment is such an odd thing to put into context. So let's start with the facts. The film opened to $75.4M at #1. On paper that's a pretty great opening, right in line with Illumination's run as of recent. However as you dig deeper it's not quite the opening I would imagine Illumination desired. First there's the fact that Despicable Me 3 broke the record for the widest release of all time, opening on 4,500+ screens passing the previous record holder Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Clearly with an opening that wide Illumination was hoping for more. In fact they had set the opening around $85M but were hoping to break $100M. DM3's opening is $8M lower than Despicable Me 2 and $40M lower than Minions. So it's clear that either people are slowly turning off from this franchise or the minion love just isn't enough to sustain a film without them front and center. We have a while till Minions 2 tests this theory but at very least this isn't the kind of expansion Illumination wanted after DE 2 almost broke $1B and Minions surpassed $1B. That said slightly disappointing doesn't matter when an $80M movie opens with $75.4M. Let's face it the Illumination under budget but massive ad campaign model is still incredibly effective and already DM3 is nearing $200M worldwide, something Cars 3 hasn't been able to meet in three weeks of release. So yeah this isn't a grand slam or a home run but it's a damn nice triple. Or to put it another way, doesn't matter how you came in first, as long as you did.

• After Wednesday it seemed like Baby Driver would be another disappointing run for Edgar Wright, but it seems word of mouth caught up as the film had a very good three day weekend haul of $21M and a five-day run of $30M. That three day run represents the best weekend release in Wright's career and the five day is just $5M shy from the lifetime domestic gross of Wright's highest grossing film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. While the director has always been a critical darling he's never been able to translate that into mainstream success. With Baby Driver carrying a budget of $34M, the film is already off to a great start. The big question now is how will this hold. Scott Pilgrim (his only other film released in over 2,000 screens) dropped a decent but not great 50% but already it seems people know who Wright is more now than back then when he was "the director of those Pegg/Frost movies". This has also been a very rewarding summer for major releases that are Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and Driver is the best reviewed film of the summer by far. Still the move from the more forgiving August to June may harm it against bigger action releases, so this will be an interesting test to see just how much word of mouth really matters this year. It helps that Baby Driver scored an A- on Cinemascore and more than half the audience was under the age of 25, which should help spread good buzz for the film on social media. Wright's managed a career base on good will and solid VOD/DVD sales but this might finally be the first genuine hit of his career, especially if it manages to pass $100M domestic.

• While this year has been incredibly kind to a lot of genres the one it hasn't been kind to is comedy as The House became the latest A-list star comedy vehicle to flop as it opened at #6 to $9M. That is the worst wide release opening for a Will Ferrell film since The Ladies Man in 2000 and by far the worst opening for Ferrell as a lead. This now joins Rough Night as another big broad comedy that completely failed to find an audience this summer. It's hard to say exactly what is going on here. Part of the problem seems to be that comedy has become incredibly split, with now the only major releases being cynical remakes or extreme high concept premises. It certainly didn't help that the studio refused to release critic reviews for the film till after it came out, a terrible sign for any film and showing a complete lack of confidence on the studio's part. Ferrell himself should be fine with Daddy's Home 2 on the horizon but it's seemingly becoming harder and harder to adjust the changing view of humor to the universality of film. Young people are just not going out to these films (76% of The House audience were over the age of 25) and comedies made for them like Popstar bomb horribly. Hollywood is going to have a tough road ahead for its comedies because what it's trying right now is not working.

• The hits just keep on coming for Wonder Woman this week which saw it's 5th week in the top five at #4 with $16M, the 14th best 5th weekend ever. Because of these incredible drops, shockingly Wonder Woman has now passed the lifetime domestic gross of Batman v Superman, despite that film opening $68M more than Wonder Woman, making it domestically the highest grossing DCEU film. Obviously BvS' horrific multiplier helped but Wonder Woman certainly got there due to incredible word of mouth as well. The film has also now passed $700M worldwide, passing the lifetime worldwide gross of Man of Steel. This also pushes the DCEU into a lifetime worldwide gross of $3B. The next potential milestone for the film seems to be passing $400M domestic which it has a good chance of doing. If it manages that then it can easily pass the $745M worldwide gross of Suicide Squad. Wonder Woman is one of the most remarkable success stories of the year and I don't know how to reframe it a new way for the 5th time so...

Films Reddit Wants to Follow

This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.

Title	Domestic Gross (Cume)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Budget	Week #
Beauty and the Beast (2017)	$503,861,542	$1,259,861,542	$160M	16
The Fate of the Furious	$225,429,900	$1,238,429,900	$250M	12
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	$383,273,975	$854,484,981	$200M	9

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross (Cume)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Budget
Hidden Figures	$169,346,772	$230,245,823	$25M
The Case for Christ	$14,678,714	$15,444,230	$3M

As always /r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.

Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at /r/moviesboxoffice.

Submitted July 03, 2017 at 09:44PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2sjcNAq