Pixar’s ‘Elio’ Stumbles as ‘28 Years Later’ Tops Friday Box Office With $14 Million

Pixar's latest now *needs* miraculous legs to potentially top $100 million domestic. Danny Boyle's return to his own groundbreaking franchise opens relatively well for an R-rated zombie flick.

Pardon the accidental sabbatical. Long story short, I’m in Ohio visiting my parents with the kids but sans the spouse. I accidentally slept in until noon on my first post-flight day, and spent the next three days in or around Cedar Point. I’m still in Akron until Tuesday night — so hoping for a make-up subscriber chat on Thursday morning — but for now it’s (famous last words?) business as usual. Well, except for the fact that I haven’t seen either of this weekend’s two big newbies. We’ll see if any of the kids want to catch the Pixar flick on this allegedly 90-degree day, but I digress. 

The weekend total should end up at around $127 million, down 18% from last year’s respective frame when Inside Out 2 earned $101 million in its second weekend. There’s more of a spread-the-wealth variable, a net good for the ecosystem and the studios choosing to release more and more varied movies. The good news is that, like in better times, a Pixar flick (Wall-E, Monsters University, and Finding Dory) opened head-to-head with an adult-skewing genre film (Wanted, World War Z, and Central Intelligence). The bad news is that, unlike the 2000s and 2010s, when both respective contenders could concurrently thrive, 28 Years Later is opening well, while Elio is… not.