How is Cars doing at the box office?
Maybe not as well as some (including me) had hoped, but at $220M in domestic box office after 6 weekends, it's still doing pretty well:
boxofficemojo.com
Some guidance for where the DBO for Cars will eventually settle can be gained by looking at other Pixar films at the same point in their release history:
Cars has $220.0M in DBO.
Monsters, Inc. had $212.4M in DBO, en route to a total of $255.9M.
The Incredibles had $232.6M in DBO, en route to a total of $261.4M.
Finding Nemo had $274.9M in DBO, en route to a total of $339.7M.
boxofficemojo.com
Note a couple things about these numbers ... The Incredibles had relatively poor legs for a family film. It opened as strongly as Finding Nemo but in the end was almost overtaken by Monsters, Inc.. Finding Nemo, as Pixar's only previous summer release, had the strongest legs of any of its releases. Cars has followed a similar trajectory, significantly outperforming both The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc. over the past two weeks, probably due to its summer release date as much as anything else.
One important note about the figures I compiled above:
Monsters, Inc. did an additional $43.5M in DBO after its 6th weekend.
The Incredibles did an additional $28.8M in DBO after its 6th weekend.
Finding Nemo did an additional $64.8M in DBO after its 6th weekend.
I find it most likely that Cars will roughly match the DBO of Monsters, Inc. in its final weeks of release, thus winding up in the $260M - $265M range. It did $15M in its last week and I think it's likely to do another $10M+ in the week to come, putting it well on its way. $260M - $265M would put Cars into 4th or 5th place on the list of the highest-grossing computer-animated films of all time:
boxofficemojo.com
It would also easily make Cars #2 in films released so far this year in terms of domestic box office:
boxofficemojo.com
So while I'm disappointed that Cars seems extremely unlikely to do $300M in DBO, which is what I initially thought it was capable of, it's still doing pretty well, even by Pixar standards, and certainly by Disney standards. Much of its worldwide box office remains to be raked in, of course, and of course, to say nothing of the real windfall to come when Cars is released to DVD and video this holiday season. |
