Box Office: Animation of 2017
Sunday, November 26, 2017 at 9:30PM by Nathaniel R
This long holiday weekend saw the releases of three major Oscar contenders. Call Me By Your Name had a sensational per screen average (101,000 per screen). Darkest Hour also showed its prosthetic Churchill face for a good opening ($44,000 per screen). And then there was Pixar's Coco, which easily trounced Justice League to take the #1 spot. Critics are raving and, more importantly, Latino critics are raving, too, as you can see at Remezcla and here at The Film Experience.
So let's do the box office report differently this weekend and look at this year's Animated Features...
| ANIMATED FEATURES AT THE BOX OFFICE IN 2017 GROSSES AS OF NOV 26th |
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| 1. Despicable Me 3 $264.3 |
6. Captain Underpants $73.9 |
| 2. Lego Batman Movie $175.7 | 7.🔺 Coco $71.1 REVIEW |
| 3. The Boss Baby $175 REVIEW |
8. Lego NinjaGo Movie $59 |
| 4. Cars 3 $152.9 | 9. Smurfs: Lost Village $45 REVIEW |
| 5. The Emoji Movie $86 REVIEW |
10. Nutjob 2 Nutty by Nature $28.3 |
That's the top ten animated films this year at the domestic box office. How high up this chart can Coco climb? It's already at #7 after its first handful of days
The Emoji Movie's high placement is where we see again (sigh) that branding is everything with the public. As long as they're familiar you can sell them just about anything. Same for Cars 3 which you may have forgotten even opened this year it received so little media attention. But parents dutifully took their kids.
It gets quite a lot more obscure after though Loving Vincent has been a steady success at arthouse theaters just pushing over the $5 million line in grosses this weekend!
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| 11. 🔺 The Star $22 | 16. Your Name $5.0 |
| 12. Leap $21.8 | 17. Pokemon the Movie I Choose You $2.4 |
| 13. My Little Pony the Movie $21.8 |
18. Sword Art Online The Movie $1.5 |
| 14. Rock Dog $9.4 | 19. Yu-Gi-Oh the Dark Side of Dimensions $1 |
| 15. 🔺 Loving Vincent $5.1 REVIEW | 20. The Red Turtle $921k REVIEW |
🔺 = still playing in theaters numbers (in millions unless otherwise noted) from box office mojo |
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Not all of these titles are eligible for the animated feature Oscar this year, most notably Your Name and The Red Turtle which were both eligible last year (with the latter being nominated). Here's the updated Best Animated Feature Chart with all the eligible titles.
Reader Comments (16)
When I saw Loving Vincent, I had never seen so many people in that particular art theatre before.
It's beautiful and intense. I felt like I was at a funeral for someone who had just died, and the eulogy was being given by a crowd of fellow artists who were extremely angry and grief-stricken.
Saw COCO- which was very nice. But OMFG... why didn't anyone warn me about the dreadful Olaf/Frozen 176 min "short" before hand? It was a *dreadful* C-level TV Xmas special with about 6 songs that went on FOREVER. What exec thought this would be a good idea?? It's amazing that decision got made b/c everyone in my theater was groaning when they realized that we were in for "more" than the typical cute 4 min short before the main feature. It was getting very restless in there by the 20 min mark. I would strongly recommend seeing COCO at a theater with reserved seating and then arriving 25 min. late. SERIOUSLY. it was that bad. Or better yet- call and ask your local theater to skip the Olaf short (like chains in Mexico are now apparently doing-- bravo!).
Anyway.. this weekend I also really enjoyed FACES/PLACES for a quiet meditative trip through the French countryside with Anges V. Recommended.
On the small screen this weekend: BURDEN OF DREAMS on Thanksgiving-- and I didn't know there would be footage of Herzog chasing a wild Peruvian turkey. Nice bonus.
and FRANTZ- thanks a million Nathaniel for pointed me towards this one. really wish I had seen it on the big screen for that lovely B/W lensing.
Above all I wish I had been watching CALL ME BY YOUR NAME this last weekend again. I've been lucky enough to see it at a sneak preview and it's *still* my most anticipated of the season. Can't wait to see it again. What a beautiful movie. It's not often you get a movie that is both gorgeous to look at and that pulls so in so completely emotionally. Really stunning work all around.
I saw "Justice League" which was better than expected well at least it was shorter than the dreary "Superman vs Batman". The Flash gets most of the laughs. Aquaman now looks like Marvel's Submariner and acts like Thor which is not a bad thing. The scripts major weakness is it's generic villain another universe destroyer with flying bugs minions.
Saw THREE BILLBOARDS, which I liked much more than I was expecting to, and LOVING VINCENT, which was beautiful but a bit plodding (narrative wise).
Want to see COCO, though hubby and friends don't seem interested, and I don't have kids or friends' kids who are quite old enough to see it - so I may have to see this one myself or wait for video.
Still waiting for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, DARKEST HOUR, and THE SHAPE OF WATER to reach my city!
See Call Me By Your Name... It pierced my soul
I saw Call Me By Your Name and Three Billboards. Call Me By Your Name lives up to the hype and is one of the best adaptations of a novel I've seen. It manages to make a novel of memory into engrossing cinema. The cast is stellar, but what makes the film transcendent is Timothee Chalamet. He jumps to the front of the line in discussing best actors of his generation. See this film and Miss Stevens from last year and you will agree with me. My only criticism of the film is that it is too coy in depicting sexuality. It yada-yada's the sexual relationship, which Luca Guadagnino confesses was due to market pressures. This coyness though is no crime because the what the film does depict is otherwise magnificent. Call Me By Your Name may skimp on the sex but it gushes with feeling and dedicates itself to examining the workings of our fragile heart. Like that soft-boiled egg Oliver has problems cracking and devours greedily, Elio's heart gets consumed here. It's hard to describe how lightly yet forcefully the film shows this, but it's a masterful display of restraint that somehow only makes the feelings even more palpable. If there is a better film this year then it's a mighty awesome year for movies.
Three Billboards is also another winner. Had I not seen Call Me By Your Name the day before I would probably be waxing about this as well. This is funny, brutal and wise about the limits of righteous anger. Frances McDormand is great as always. I'd probably prefer an Oscar win for Saoirse Ronan but I would not be mad at all if McDormand wins. Sam Rockwell is also terrific and has a satisfying character arc that should help him get nominated. What's most unique about the film is how it defies the viewer's expectations and plays out its story truthfully. I wish more films trusted the audience the way this does.
Nathaniel,
I know you're not a box office expert but for perspective...Cars 3 was a box office disappointment. So was the Emoji Movie. These two were not made to gross less than 200 and less than 100mil.
Raul Borja: Your comments about Call Me By Your Name are some of the most perceptive I've seen.
What a film!
CMBYN doesn't open in my city until December 22nd, so I had to make do and finally caught up on Armie Hammer's other 2017 film MINE, which I enjoyed. It was odd hearing Tom Cullen attempting a Texan accent though. Also, just watched HEY ARNOLD! THE JUNGLE MOVIE tonight. Well worth the 13-15 year wait, and I wouldn't have minded if it had been a theatrical release.
I saw 'Three Billboards' and 'Beats Per Minute.' I didn't love either of them as much as I was expecting to.
I saw Lady Bird and I loved it so much. Greta Gerwig is a treasure! There are so few coming-of-age films about women that are on this level... in fact, this may be the best one ever made.
I also saw Three Billboards and probably would have liked it more if I hadn't seen Lady Bird the day before, but it was still very good, and McDormand was outsanding.
Saw Three Billboards which was just great. The whole is better than the parts, as there are some issues here and there. But with those actors giving those performances, the humor, the emotion, the unexpected turns, the ending...it really works overall.
Also saw Notorious since even hard-to-find mediocre Hitchcock is entertaining, and because Nick Davis picked Bergman as his winner for Best Actress that year, and this one delivered. Very entertaining and suspenseful, although, like The Philadelphia Story, I don't think it really capitalizes on Grant's charm and charisma. Although maybe, as good and charismatic as he is, he's a somewhat inconsistent performer?
Edward L: Thanks so much! My mark of a great film is that I keep thinking about it days after, which I still am with CMBYN.
DJDeeJay--What were your issues with Three Billboards? I had some story issues too such as (SPOILER-ish) the fact that Sam Rockwell's character is not arrested for doing what he does. Is the department and the town so complicit and corrupt that they would overlook such a brazen act?
TR -- i am aware i'm not an expert ;) but I didn't mean to imply that they were "hits" exactly though both cannot really be called flops when you work out their global sums with their budgets. I'm just listing the grosses in order. And there is no earthly way given tepid audience response and reviews and lack of media enthusiasm that they had any right to gross as much as they did so that there is branding working for them. Sigh again ;)
Jaragon -- isn't that crazy that superhero producers keep choosing villains and minions that are so similar? And even audiences that like those movies are never that impressed with the villains.
djdeeday -- its' weird to hear Notorious described as "middling" I haven't seen it in years and years but it's way up there in my fav Hitchcock and years before I had grasped the genius of Psycho and Vertigo it was my favorite.
Hitchcok's "Notorious" is one of his best films not only we do we to enjoy the true movie star power of Grant and Bergman- the kiss that seems to go on forever- but we get Claude Rains as tragic villain.
I watched My Little Pony the Movie for the 10th time this past weekend, and to honor the milestone I drove all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming (I live in Texas) to watch it at the historic Lincoln Theater, a quaint little retro theater situated in the city's downtown.