Minions & Monsters posts franchise-low opening as Supergirl drops sharply

Minions & Monsters opened to the weakest start in the seven-film Despicable Me and Minions franchise, taking in about $61 million to $64.5 million over the five-day Fourth of July holiday frame across 4,243 North American theaters. The 1920s Hollywood-set prequel led the holiday box office, but the result landed below expectations for Universal and Illumination and below the roughly $80 million that tracking had suggested was in reach.

The size of the gap mattered because the Minions films have long been one of Hollywood’s most dependable family-audience properties. This weekend’s launch, reported as the franchise low, came with an $85 million production budget and followed a run of far bigger debuts for earlier entries in the series. Even with a Friday take of $16 million from 4,243 locations, the title never matched the kind of opening that once made the brand a near-certain summer anchor.

The softer debut also sharpened questions around audience appetite. Some reporting pointed to lower audience scores and the unusual holiday pull of America 250 as factors that may have dampened turnout, even as the film was widely described as well-reviewed and still finished No. 1 for the frame. That combination, a strong brand name but a weaker-than-expected launch, gives studio executives a clearer warning than a single bad weather weekend ever could: franchise recognition alone is no longer guaranteeing the family turnout it once did.

Supergirl only deepened the picture on the other side of the ledger. The Warner Bros. and DC Studios release fell 74% in its second weekend, after opening the previous frame with about $37 million and heading toward roughly $10 million in weekend two. Other contemporaneous estimates placed the drop between 73% and 76%, a steep fall that puts the movie alongside some of the harsher second-weekend declines in recent superhero releases, including Joker: Folie à Deux, The Marvels and The Flash.

Industry coverage has already treated Supergirl as a sign of larger pressure on DC Studios and on lesser-known comic-book heroes. Paired with Minions & Monsters’ franchise-low opening, the holiday frame offered a blunt reminder that even the most familiar Hollywood formulas, family animation and superhero spectacle, are drawing a thinner margin for error than studio calendars once assumed.