Box Office: 'Minions' Goes Bananas With Record $46M Friday

The Despicable Me franchise didn't miss a beat, with the spin-off Minions playing like a proverbial part 3 of the relatively new animated series. The Illumination/Universal ( Comcast Corp.) release stars Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, and co-director Pierre Coffin (as the voice of all of the title characters) and operates as a prequel set in the UK during the 1960's that shows how the Despicable Me sidekicks came to be and what they were up to before they met Gru. The film earned an eye-popping $46.171 million on its first day of release, which tops the $41.7m opening Friday of Toy Story 3 and the $38.4m opening Friday of Shrek the Third to become the biggest opening day/Friday for an animated film in history. It sits only behind the $47.1m Saturday of Shrek the Third  and just ahead of the $44.8m Saturday gross of Shrek 2 among all-time top animated single days. It earned $2.794m in PLF screens for 6% of the total gross.

If you want to complain that the film's record-breaking (for an animated film) $6.2m Thursday previews began really early (6:00pm) this time out, go for it, but it's not like it played any more of a factor than inflation and the 3D bump in the top tiers of the animated record books. I hesitate to presume that the film's Saturday will make more than its Friday, as theatrical moviegoing is so frontloaded that even kid-friendly animated films have been affected, but it's not impossible either. What's in play is the opening weekend record for an animated film. The top four debuts are Shrek the Third ($121.6 million), Toy Story 3 ($110.3m), Shrek 2 ($108m), and Inside Out ($90.4m). At this point, it looks like Minions will at least end up in fourth place with third and possibly second likely possibilities.

To wit, Toy Story 3 had a 2.65x weekend multiplier, Inside Out had a 2.68x, Monsters University had a 2.71x, and Despicable Me 2 had a 2.74x during the $83m Fri-Sun portion of its $140m Wed-Sun debut. So it looks like, barring inexplicable variables, that Minions is looking at between $119m (2.6x) and $126.775m (2.75x). The one "worst case scenario" to watch out for is the 2.4x ($30m Friday/$74m weekend) of The Simpsons back in 2007.  Such a result would give Minions a sad and shameful $110m weekend. As you can see, there isn't really a realistic scenario where this one isn't already a massive hit, and that's not even counting the $141m worth of overseas grosses that the film took in before even opening in America.

Universal gets another feather in its cap for this stunning debut, and it's clear that the Despicable Me franchise is the new dominant animated franchise of our time and that Sandra Bullock has just topped her own opening weekend record for the sixth time since 2007. That's enough for now. We'll have more Minions  box office blather tomorrow when we see how high up it ends up on the animated opening weekend. In the meantime, banana, banana, banana.