“DC League of Super-Pets” comes to the rescue after a quiet July at the movies.
Even while the Warner Bros. animated superhero comedy isn’t going to end the month on a high note, it will still manage to top domestic box office rankings. When it debuts in 4,300 North American theatres over the weekend, “DC League of Super-Pets” is looking for $25 million to $30 million, which should be enough to unseat Jordan Peele’s “Nope” as the top film in the nation. Peele’s UFO thriller, which debuted last weekend to $41 million in revenue, is predicted to lose between $15 and $16 million in its second outing, a fall of nearly 60%.
Family-friendly films have had a mixed record at the box office during the pandemic, with Universal’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru” earning a strong $300 million domestically to date and Paramount’s “Paws of Fury” sputtering with $14 million. “DC League of Super-Pets” is in the middle of those movies in terms of brand recognition; while it isn’t a continuation of the wildly successful “Minions” franchise, it is based on DC mythos and so isn’t wholly new to audiences. The movie cost $90 million to make, so it will need to appeal to young children (and comic book fans) to be financially successful.
Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Kate McKinnon provide the voices for the Justice League members’ four-legged companions in the Jared Stern-directed animated film “DC League of Super-Pets.” Positive reviews for the movie have been published, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman stating, “The plot is…a plot. Busy and frantic and diagrammed. But there are just enough wild-card moments along the way, like those involving a baby-voiced kitten who coughs up hairball grenades.”
Focus Features is releasing “Vengeance,” a true-crime-inspired black comedy from “The Office” alum B.J. Novak, in much fewer theatres. The R-rated movie, which has less than 1,000 theatres, is shooting for a low single-digit opening weekend gross of roughly $2 million.
In the movie, which he also wrote, Novak plays a podcaster and journalist from New York City who goes to Texas to look into the murder of a woman he was only briefly dating. The cast is completed by Boyd Holbrook, Dove Cameron, Issa Rae, and Ashton Kutcher.
The majority of “Vengeance” reviews have been positive, and reviewers especially liked the humour that felt out of place. “Vengeance” is an appealing original — a dizzying, jaunty, witty-as-they-come tall story that’s just grounded enough in the real world to carry you along,” said Gleiberman, who named the movie a “terrific directorial debut.”