America celebrates hard-fought freedom by spending it watching Despicable Me 4
Gru and his little yellow creatures are handily winning the July 4 box office
Join us, for a moment, in a thought experiment. You are a soldier in the Continental Army, weathering a Valley Forge winter (the harshest in the course of the entire Revolutionary War). You do this because, yes, General Washington has threatened to shoot you if you desert—but also in pursuit of your personal conception of American liberty. With your colleagues, you have frozen, starved, and suffered for a dream. And then, all of a sudden, and with no warning, a bizarre portal opens up before you, a rift in time and space, showing you a vision broadcast from 247 years in the future—of the country that you are, at this very moment, agonizing in the creation of. You see hundreds of your descendants sitting in a darkened room, all facing the same direction, and laughing their heads off. On the glowing wall before them, a little yellow Twinkie-man keeps saying “banana” in a funny voice while things explode around him. A needle drop that even you, an 18th century illiterate farmer, are sick of at this point, starts playing while the little yellow thing says “banana” again. Just as quickly, the portal closes. You are alone—possibly, you now suspect, forever.
Anyway, Despicable Me 4 had a pretty good July 4 weekend.
The film’s success—which will ultimately bring it to roughly $120 million domestic across the extended holiday weekend—continues a trend at the generally sleepy 2024 box office: Family friendly movies are a lot more likely to do old-school money than more adult fare. (Inside Out 2 is still kicking along in theaters, for instance, having comfortably become the first movie to cruise past the billion-dollar global box office mark since Barbie and Mario last year; it’s the second highest-performer of the weekend, too, despite having been in theaters for four weeks at this point.) Despicable Me 4 might not end up posting those kinds of numbers, but it’s still a demonstration that, while movies clearly aimed at non-kid audiences, like Furiosa and The Fall Guy, have faltered despite critical praise, kids’ movies remain fairly bulletproof. (Especially ones with a built-in brand advantage like this one.)
Third place for the weekend did go to one of those more adult movies, though: A Quiet Place: Day One, now in its second week in theaters. The prequel film is expected to hit a domestic total of $90 million before the weekend is over. Meanwhile, Ti West’s MaXXXine will take fourth place, earning $7.6 million—which, it’s worth noting, is more than the openings of predecessors X and Pearl combined, which has to be taken as a win in West’s deliberately low-budget niche. Somewhat ironically (given the religious vibes of West’s flick), the film is fighting it out with Angel Studio’s latest release, Sound Of Hope: The Story Of Possum Trot, which isn’t quite doing for Hope what the studio’s breakout hit Sound Of Freedom did for Freedom last July 4, bringing in just $7 million across the weekend.