Minions & Monsters earned the best reviews in franchise history — a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- CinemaScore from opening-night audiences. It also posted the franchise's worst debut: an estimated $39.5 million for the three-day weekend and $64.5 million across the five-day July 4th frame, per Sunday studio estimates. Two years ago, Despicable Me 4 did $120 million over the same corridor. Minions: The Rise of Gru did about $122 million in 2022. Even Despicable Me 3 managed $99 million — in 2017, at 2017 ticket prices.
The family audience didn't disappear. It split. Disney's Toy Story 5, in its third weekend, pulled an estimated $30 million and crossed $365 million domestic by Sunday — the first time a Despicable Me or Minions release has ever shared this window with a Toy Story. Add a record 72.2 million Americans traveling, a heat dome with most of the country under alerts, and World Cup matches airing all weekend, and the yellow guys walked into the most contested July 4th for attention in memory. Universal expects overseas markets to cushion the blow — the trades put the international haul in the $87 million range through Sunday.
The uncomfortable part for Universal: quality didn't move the number. A franchise-best score bought a franchise-worst open. That breaks the standard postmortem — this isn't a bad-movie miss, it's a demand story. For fifteen years, family animation was Hollywood's most bankable product because a big animated tentpole effectively owned its release window. This weekend, two A-list family franchises collided head-on, and both ate less.
Our take
The lesson isn't IP fatigue, and reviews were never going to be the rescue. It's that IP no longer buys a monopoly weekend — and family animation's economics were built on monopoly weekends. When parents can choose between two safe bets, or wait a couple of months for streaming, opening weekend stops measuring quality and starts measuring urgency. That repricing touches every animated greenlight in town, and it lands days before Q2 earnings, where Comcast will have to explain the new floor under its crown-jewel franchise. Same pattern as the holiday consumer: demand is intact, but the mix decides who wins.
What to watch
- Monday actuals: holiday Mondays skew strong for family films. A big number says this weekend was displacement — families traveling, not rejecting the movie.
- The digital-rental date: how fast Universal moves Minions & Monsters to PVOD is the cleanest tell on internal expectations.
- Second-weekend holds for both family tentpoles — the head-to-head decay rate decides which franchise keeps pricing power.
- Comcast's Q2 earnings call: film-slate commentary arrives alongside the market's new habit of punishing beats that miss the vibe.