Weekend Box Office Report: Easter Dips

Not quite a fruitful weekend for animation, considering the holiday and all...

Second place. The Boss Baby. Dropped 41%. Home did way better that weekend, so it looks like The Boss Baby will end up somewhere in the low-to-mid 160s, which is still pretty good. Worldwide it sits at $238 million, it is out everywhere now except in Kuwait and Poland. I guess it'll be another $300 million+ worldwide grosser for the studio. I wonder if they'll view it as a pass or a flop.

The little blue guys got hit even harder. Smurfs: The Lost Village fell 50%, an unusually big drop for an animated film on its second weekend. So much for taking advantage of that Easter timeframe, eh Sony? Domestically it's at $24 million and worldwide it's at $95 million. The last three markets are China, India, and South Korea. Could it triple its $60 million budget? Who knows, but I reckon the juice has run out and Sony might move onto other things.

All the way down in 24th place is ToonBox's Spark: A Space Tail. A movie that was completed in early 2016, screened to an audience at a film festival just about a year ago... Open Road Films sat on it, didn't ink a release date for a long, long while. Then they did, but didn't promote it. A trailer came out just a matter of weeks ago, and then it turned out that they had no use for it. It was dumped in a little over 350 theaters this weekend, not screened for critics, and the few reviews that seeped onto Rotten Tomatoes are pretty... Well... Unkind.

Makes me wonder how they'll handle Blazing Samurai and Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad, both of which are set to open next year and also don't carry any concrete release dates at the moment.

It opened with $112k. What was the point of even releasing it theatrically? Quite something, how an inoffensive, arguably DTV-grade picture like that can get a release this size while truly great works of animated art have to settle for tiny amounts of theaters. I was very curious about this picture for a long time, then the trailer showed up and while I didn't dislike what I saw, I did see that it was just another pic aimed at the roughly 6-10 set.

Sing and Moana still roll in some venues. The former: $270m DOM / $621m WW. The latter: $248m DOM / $637m WW.

GKIDS gave My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea an expectedly tiny release. $15k from 3 theaters.

No update on Your Name. yet.

Elusive Monkey: 'Spark' Only Opening in 350 Theaters Nationwide

It all makes sense now...

The arrival of the trailer less than two months before release, the relatively quiet marketing, the long wait...

ToonBox's second animated feature, Spark: A Space Tail, is opening in (according to Box Office Mojo) around 350 theaters this coming Friday. Talk about little-to-no confidence.

Open Road's first animated release, ToonBox's own The Nut Job, was a pretty wide release. It is actually Open Road's highest grossing film at the domestic box office. The sequel - opening in August - will also be a wide release. It always seemed like they had little use for Spark. The movie was completed back in early 2016, and was shown at the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International in April of that year. For a long while, it didn't have a concrete theatrical release date or a distributor.

Perhaps Open Road got cold feet after the performance of a similar spacey animated release, Ratchet & Clank. Unlike Ratchet & Clank, Spark is not based on any pre-existing source material. The trailer did give me Ratchet & Clank vibes, but it also reminded me of other platformer games that came out in the late 90s/early 00s, such as Jak & Daxter. When talking about upcoming movies with my manager today, this came up, and he described it as "Ape Escape on steroids" or something. To me, it almost looks like a pilot for a mid-2000s Cartoon Network CG TV series, honestly. Something they would've shown on their old Miguzi block, a.k.a. the wannabe-successor to Toonami.

But Open Road still has enough to confidence to book it in 350 theaters. I honestly didn't think it looked that bad from the trailer, but it didn't look like anything special either. Certainly better-looking than The Nut Job, and more interesting-looking than Nut Job 2. Well, I guess the distributor doesn't expect a small success out of this one.

What say you?

Monkey Business: 'Spark' Trailer Finally Debuts

Completed over a year ago, and set to hit theaters in a matter of weeks... Spark finally got itself a trailer.

Oh, excuse me. Spark: A Space Tail... Yep, they're sticking with that. Okay, so the trailer itself...


Honestly?

It doesn't look too bad!

One thing is for certain, though. The writing is pretty much aiming at a younger crowd here, but I do like everything else. I'm fond of these particular kinds of stories where they build these weird worlds and planets. Nothing new, but it's something I've always liked. I got some serious Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank vibes from this, two video game franchises that started in the early 2000s and were just this. It's no surprise that the movie is reminding some of the Ratchet & Clank movie from last year.

On the whole, it looks inoffensive and just okay. No cringeworthy lines or jokes sans the "kick some asteroid" line (you stole that from Ratchet & Clank!), got a chuckle or two out of it. It'll probably just come and go, though I am curious. It has the potential to be a surprisingly fun, lightweight adventure. What I really want, soon, is a picture like this. A sorta set in another world colorful adventure, but one written like a Disney Animation or Pixar film. Disney Animation did it before with Treasure Planet, it'd be nice if they could do it again. They almost did with the cancelled Cosmic 3000/untitled space race movie.

To those outside of the animation sphere, this probably looks like a kid-lite Star Wars/Guardians of the Galaxy. The trailer's text and editing probably doesn't help much, nor does the fact that Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 opens weeks after it. I know a great, all-ages movie can be made out of this sort of thing, and be a great animated alien/fantasy tale. One that doesn't look like "Star Wars/GOTG for kids"... In the meantime, I'm curious about this one.

What say you?