After several lackluster weeks at the box office, many have wondered when things would pick up this year. A step in the right direction came this weekend: Audiences turned “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” into a bona fide hit.
The third installation of Universal’s animated dragon series sold $55.5 million in tickets, exceeding most analysts’ expectations and giving the franchise the best opening weekend of any of its three movies.
That figure is especially impressive given that the latest (and supposedly final) “Dragon” installment had a slightly lower budget than either of the previous movies — about $129 million, against $165 million for the original (2010) and $145 for the second (2014), according to Box Office Mojo.
Also notable: The two best opening weekends this year have both been for the final installments of trilogies. Until this weekend, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass” held the top spot. That superhero thriller opened last month to about $41 million in its first weekend.
The latest “Dragon” likely benefited from a lack of competition — it was the only newcomer in the box office’s top five this week — and strong reviews (it currently holds a 91 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Big-name voices probably helped, too: The series features Cate Blanchett and Gerard Butler as the parents of its protagonist, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel). Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington lent their pipes to lesser roles (though Ben Kenigsberg, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that you suspect that some of the actors “stopped by the recording studio only briefly”).
There’s a gulf in sales between “Dragon” and this weekend’s second-place movie: Fox’s “Alita: Battle Angel” brought in just $12 million this weekend according to comScore, which compiles box office data. That’s not a great second-week showing for a film that cost roughly $170 million to make. Since opening, the Robert Rodriguez-directed movie has grossed an estimated $60.7 million domestically.
Landing in fourth place, after “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” grabbed third, was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “Fighting With My Family,” the comedic drama based on the life of professional wrestler Saraya-Jade Bevis (known as Paige and played here by Florence Pugh). It opened in Los Angeles and New York earlier this month, but it got its first taste of nationwide ticket sales this weekend, bringing in about $8 million.
That’s respectable for a movie that had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival just last month and, according to The Hollywood Reporter, was produced for only about $11 million. The fact that Dwayne Johnson was a producer probably didn’t hurt.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.