As TMNT wins the weekend, are cartoon animals beating superheroes at the box office?
IT’S BECOME a tortoise-and-the-hare sort of year at the box office. Except that in 2016, the fuzzy jumper is winning the race.
Which raises the question: Is the CGI animal becoming “the new superhero” of multiplex domination?
So much verbal hyperventilation is devoted to asking how great the American capacity is for caped-crime-fighter movies. Yet as much as ever, you can’t swing a chew toy over your head in Hollywood without hitting a pixelated critter. Are we now testing audience limits for digital beasties, too? Perhaps only a CGI-animal superhero — say, a martial-arts terrapin — can best answer that, especially after the box-office weekend just ended.
Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” won the domestic weekend with an underwhelming $35.3 million opening — barely mustering more than than half what the 2014 original debuted to ($65.6 million). Some industry observers noted that except for “Captain America: Civil War,” sequels have been seriously underperforming this year.
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Meanwhile, though the turtles opened slow, the digital hare is showing a strong finishing kick. Disney’s “Zootopia,” featuring its wide-eyed police bunny, has just crossed the $1 billion mark in global gross — only the fourth animated film ever to do so. (The others are the Disney-distributed “Frozen” and “Toy Story 3,” and Universal’s “Minions.”)
Disney’s record-breaking half-year has also been powered by the state-of-the-art CGI beasts of “The Jungle Book.” The film, which grossed $4.24 million domestically over the weekend — right behind the debut of the flopping “Popstar” ($4.63 million) — has now amassed $895.1 million worldwide, good enough to crack the all-time Top 40.
Still due out from Disney this month is the Pixar sequel “Finding Dory,” which could well gross more than $1 billion worldwide — especially considering that the 2003 original, “Finding Nemo,” grossed $937 million (not adjusted for inflation).
So although “Captain America: Civil War” ($1.13 billion worldwide) is Disney’s top film of the year, superheroes won’t reign in total numbers even within the Mouse House — if “Dory,” like “Jungle Book,” can come close to “Zootopia’s” rarefied air.
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Why, things are so green for Disney’s digital critters right now, even the CGI White Rabbit has helped a disappointment like “Alice Through the Looking Glass” gross $176 million worldwide.
Elsewhere for computerized creatures this year, Fox’s “Kung Fu Panda 3” has grossed $518 million worldwide; and Sony’s “The Angry Birds Movie” has grossed $283 million. And still to come this summer: Disney’s “The BFG” (July 1); Universal’s “The Secret Life of Pets” (July 8); and Fox’s “Ice Age: Collision Course” (July 22).
So let’s set aside the hand-wringing over superhero “fatigue” or Hollywood’s “sequelitis” for a spell. Because in 2016, as long as the CGI beasts are thick on this verdant forest floor, the box office will apparently remain just as green.
King of the jungle, indeed.
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