Who would you rather fight, a million spider-sized ape or one ape-sized spider? It’s a question that’s been haunting my mind since, oh, about an hour ago when I started to look up the box office numbers for this past weekend. And while I might not be any closer to solving my riddle, I can at least say this: when it comes to week-old spiders versus brand new primates, the primates are destined to win. Here’s the box office numbers as of Sunday afternoon:
Did any new releases come out this weekend? I honestly can’t remember. Someone mentioned that there was a new Marvel movie in theaters - one featuring some sort of Spider-Person - but that can’t be right. I feel like I would’ve seen that, perhaps promoted on an unprecedented level for any superhero movie? Hmm. Well, anyways, here’s the weekend box office estimates as of Sunday afternoon:
It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, Edgar Wright fans: did the filmmaker’s action-packed Baby Driver score big with audiences? Or does this weekend belong to sequels, sequels, and more sequels? This weekend was always going to belong to Despicable Me 3— it’s a big hit with the kiddos, don’t you know— but there’s definitely some room for optimism in how the rest of the weekend Top 10 shook out. Here’s the numbers as of Sunday afternoon:
Can someone explain to me why Gru, a man with no neck, wears a scarf? Is it a fashion statement? Do supervillains even care about fashion? I don’t get it.
I don’t quite understand why, but people really seem to want to eat the Minions, the lovable yellow goobers from the Despicable Me franchise. When Minions came out, there were Minions Twinkies, and there have been Minions menus at IHOP too. Now generally I am a big fan of movie food, but this goes beyond my limits. The Minions are sentient beings; why would you want to consume them?!?
It wouldn’t be a Despicable Me movie without an original Pharrell Williams song, now would it? “Happy” topped the charts back in 2013 ahead of Despicable Me 2’s release, won an Oscar and a Grammy, and remains a staple of sorority recruitment videos and soft drink commercials to this day. For Universal’s follow-up, the singer has composed a slightly more sedate number, titled “There’s Something Special,” the music video for which was released today. There’s something going on in this video, all right, but I dunno if it’s special.
It’s not guaranteed, but there’s a legitimate chance that when all is said and done that Despicable Me 3 reigns supreme as the top-grossing movie of the 2017 summer box office. The previous sequels, plus the Minions spinoff, have grossed more than $2.6 billion worldwide, and each of the last two made well over $300 million in the United States alone. Despicable Me 3 looks like it will offer plenty of what fans of the series crave: Those goofy gibberish-spouting Minions, wacky misadventures, and plenty of Steve Carell’s lovably evil Gru, plus now he’s got a twin brother (or, as he calls him, “a tween broothur”) to contend with as well.
You probably know Minions, the spinoff of Despicable Me starring those lovably fiendish yellow henchmen, was a big hit in the summer of 2015. But did you know Minions is the first non-Disney animated movie to make more than $1 billion worldwide? (The Disney movies that have done it are Zootopia, Finding Dory, Toy Story 3, and Frozen.) That’s just one of the facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!