HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON live-action | THE MATERIALISTS openings | Where we are now | June 13 to 15, 2025 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary.
The current weekend: June 13 to 15, 2025
1) How to Train Your Dragon live-action opening
- This is an excellent opening for a live-action animation remake, and it's especially good for the 4th episode in a series like this. The weekend figure is well above both averages, with very good critics' reviews and an outstanding audience score (an A CinemaScore).
There are only 7 animation series that have made it to 4 episodes — that's how rare this is. By adding live-action elements, the film is extending and elevating the storytelling with something new and different. It’s a smart and effective direction to take the series in.
The opening is an est. +50% better than the last episode and it’s another series high for the industry:
Animation. Live-action. Hybrid. Altogether now.
- Now, about that "live-action" label. That's not what this really is. This is a hybrid mix of animated settings, a fantasy dragon, and human characters. It's the combination of those different elements that makes it so interesting for mainstream audiences. It's imaginative, stimulating and funny, and moviegoers love it.
- Hybrid filmmaking is at full strength now. Just about all action fantasies are hybrids. Superheroes? Definitely. This is heightened, virtual reality filmmaking, using state-of-the-art animation and digital effects from start to finish. It’s a natural step forward using computational art to raise human storytelling.
It started in 1988 when Disney and Amblin’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? showed how entertaining this could be. We just saw it with Lilo & Stitch. Sonic the Hedgehog, Babe, Ted, Peter Rabbit, Garfield, Paddington, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the list goes on (not to mention endless action and sci-fi movies).
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? made in 1988 with hand-drawn animation on individual film cells, earned $330 million worldwide — well over a billion dollars today Snow White is closer to a real live-action remake, with human actors in human-scale settings, and those kinds of fantasies are struggling. A heroine's story retold realistically becomes smaller and thinner, not bigger and richer. It diminishes the fantasy rather than expands it. We'll see fewer of those in the future.
2) The Materialists opening
- This is an excellent opening for a film that works both as romance-drama and romantic comedy. It's a grown-up story that's well-timed as summer counter-programming. Critics’ reviews are excellent, with a mixed audience score (a B- CinemaScore) — not surprising for a story that poses a question: Who should she be with?
Writer-director Celine Song is a huge talent. Her Past Lives debut was an indie smash, earning $42.7 million worldwide and receiving Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Academy nominations. This movie isn't breaking multicultural ground like that film did, but it's no sophomore slump:
Where we are now
- This weekend’s total business is very good, but as noted, the same weekend last year and in the years before the pandemic were especially strong (Inside Out 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4 and the first Wonder Woman, all $100m openers), so the current pace is slipping.
Next weekend has two more big releases (28 Years Later and Pixar’s Elio). The pressure not just to perform, but to over-perform every weekend in order to keep up, is unrelenting.
- This Wednesday we'll look at original, non-series films. For the moment, we've done enough with franchise movies. With The Materialists off to a strong start, let's update what some people think are "real movies."
Our last two posts were:
THE WEDNESDAY CHARTS | Horror films, 2025 mid-year update | June 11, 2025 here
FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA | THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME openings | Where we are now | June 6 to 8, 2025 weekend here