Fish, unless they’re breaded, carved into sticks and thrown into a freezer, don’t typically last that long. You want to enjoy them when they’re as fresh as possible. But when it comes to colorful, lovable, forgetful fish, moviegoers will make an exception.
Despite challenges from a beard-bedecked Matthew McConaughey and another bevy of angry aliens, Finding Dory won the box office championship for the second straight weekend—and it did so in impressive fashion. The estimated $73.2 million that the fish flick made was, according to the good folks at Box Office Mojo, one of the best second weekends of all time. Obviously, this fish story isn’t floundering.
Disney/Pixar’s Finding Dory has already banked $286.6 million domestically in about 10 days, making it one of the year’s few sequels to not go belly up. (It doesn’t hurt, of course, that unlike many of the other sequels, Finding Dory was pretty good.) Oh, and get this. With Finding Dory making money hand-over-fin, Disney now owns four of the year’s top six money makers: Captain America: Civil War at No. 1 ($403.9 million); The Jungle Book at No. 3 ($358 million); Zootopia at No. 4 ($340.4 million) and, of course, Finding Dory at sixth.
Independence Day: Resurgence obviously didn’t have the firepower to take down one little blue fish. But it still had enough oomph to blast its way to second place and $41.6 million in North America. It did better overseas, naturally, pocketing more than $100 million in 57 countries. CGI explosions translate well into any language.
Central Intelligence earned the weekend’s third-place bronze medal with $18.4 million, forcing two other newcomers off the podium. The Shallows—the one in which Blake Lively is stalked by a strangely malicious shark—outperformed its rather shallow estimates, thrashing to $16.7 million. Free State of Jones fared worse, banking just $7.8 million for fifth place. Perhaps audiences were hoping that the movie was free. When they discovered that it wasn’t, they opted to see Finding Dory again instead.
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