Box office: Despicable Me recaptures a bit of July 4 magic, Sound of Hope doesn't

Every Gru/Minions movie has opened within a week of the American national holiday, while Sound of Hope follows Sound of Freedom as another Fourth-of-July Angel Studios movie about "saving kids".

Gru (voice of Steve Carell) in Despicable Me 4.

Two very different brands tried to recapture a little Fourth of July magic at the box office this weekend. One succeeded handily. The other… didn’t.

First, the success: Despicable Me 4 topped the chart with an estimated $122.5 million between Wednesday and Sunday, which was the 2nd-best opening of any film with the words “despicable me” in the title, behind 2013’s Despicable Me 2.

The five-day total also beat the opening weekends for the two Minions spin-offs, which opened on Fridays in 2015 and 2022.

All six of the Minions / Despicable Me movies have opened within a week of the Fourth of July—either a few days before it, or a few days after it—and the franchise as a whole has done remarkably consistent business over the past dozen years, as each of the sequels and prequels has grossed at least $940 million worldwide. The last two films before the Covid lockdowns both crossed the billion-dollar mark.

No other animated series has had that kind of success. Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story had four big hits and then one big flop with Lightyear. DreamWorks’ Shrek surged and then faded over the course of four films, which were followed by two Puss in Boots spin-offs that did okay but never reached the heights of the previous films. Fox-Blue Sky’s Ice Age was, for a time, one of the biggest franchises of all time internationally, but then it basically ran out of gas on its fifth trip ’round the block.

Meanwhile, six movies in, Gru and his Minions keep raking in the big bucks. And they always do it in close proximity to America’s national holiday. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they basically “own” this holiday, movie-wise.

Meanwhile, at the less-successful end of the spectrum, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot landed in 7th place with an estimated $3.2 million for the weekend, and a total of $6.8 million since opening on Thursday—which, depending on whether you count Thursday as part of the “weekend”, was either one of the strongest or weakest openings for Angel Studios, the faith-friendly streaming service turned theatrical distributor that had a huge, huge hit with Sound of Freedom last year.

Sound of Hope has no narrative connection to Sound of Freedom—they’re completely different stories—but they arguably share a “brand” insofar as they have similar titles, they both came out on the Fourth of July, and they are both part of what Angel CEO Neal Harmon has called an “anthology of [movies about] saving kids”. (Sound of Freedom was about child trafficking, Sound of Hope is about children in foster care.)

Sound of Freedom famously outgrossed a lot of big-budget movies last year, including the latest installments of the Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible franchises. But Sound of Hope hasn’t come close to scoring those kinds of numbers.

The film’s opening weekend was the 2nd-lowest in the studio’s history, ahead of only last May’s Sight—though if you add Thursday’s numbers to the mix (and why not, since most “opening weekend” figures include “Thursday-night previews”), Sound of Hope had the 3rd-best opening of any Angel Studios film, behind Sound of Freedom’s $19.7 million (weekend only) last summer and Cabrini’s $7.2 million last March.

The question now is what kind of “legs” the film will have. As ever, we shall see.

Meanwhile, in other top-ten news:

• Inside Out 2 is still ahead of where Barbie was at this point in its release, though it is beginning to slip on a week-to-week basis.

• Thanks to Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, and A Quiet Place: Day One, this is the first time since last summer that three films grossed over $20 million on the same weekend.

• Kalki 2898 AD is now one of the top three Indian films ever in North America.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: