Elemental Keeps Building Box Office Steam

Elemental’s box office has been sparking up since its mid-June release.

According to the weekend’s box office reporting from Variety, Pixar’s romcom has now earned $251.9 million globally, something of a surprise given how it initially seemed like it would fizzle out as other films popped up over the summer. But over the last several weeks, Disney’s done a better job at conveying what the film actually is and relating it to the real world context of its director Peter Sohn. Combined with people now having free time to see movies during the summer, it earned another $9.6 million from North America this weekend, bringing its total to $109.2 million domestically. It’s now the first original animated movie of the decade, and possibly the first original animated flick since 2018, to cross the desired $100 million domestic threshold entirely.

As far as this weekend’s big genre release is concerned, Blumhouse’s Insidious: The Red Door took the top spot with $64.1 million worldwide. Directed by its lead star Patrick Wilson, it performed above initial expectations in North America at $32.6 million. Folks love themselves some horror, and Red Door now has the second-highest domestic opening of the entire franchise behind the $40 million start for 2013’s Insidious: Chapter 2. With an international opening of $31.4 million, Red Door also has the distinction of having the highest-grossing horror movie in the pandemic era.

Now that Insidious is at number one, last week’s Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny went down to second place. With $31.8 million internationally and $26.5 million in North America, the action movie’s total is now at $247.9 million, which is still just kind of okay, performance-wise. But Elemental shows that not every movie’s fate is set in stone, and it could be that in the coming weeks, Dial winds up some extra cash before it hits Disney+ later in the year.

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