There weren't a lot of surprises at the box office this weekend. Megamind opened right in line with most Dreamworks animated originals, with $46 million. The standard for non-sequels in the Dreamworks cartoon library is $43-47 million. Opening just below A Shark Tale ($47.6 million) and Madagascar ($47.2 million), the supervillain epic has the fifth biggest opening for a non-sequel in the Dreamworks animation catalogue, also behind Monsters Vs. Aliens ($59.3 million) and Kung Fu Panda ($60.2 million). It was their ninth-biggest animated opening overall. More impressive was the 3.68x weekend multiplier, which is one of their biggest weekend multiplier in recent memory.
The film didn't open anywhere near the $56 million debut of Despicable Me, but Universal used the yellow minions to sell the film to the kids, while using the whole 'root for a super-villain' angle for the grownups. Megamind didn't really have a kid-friendly angle, so it was up to the parents to drag their kids along. The film played 57% female and 52% over 25 and scored an A- from Cinemascore. 66% of the tickets were sold for the 3D version (7% in IMAX 3D), which says something as it was the first major 3D release in a long time where 2D options were plentiful. Point being, if you give audiences, especially large families with young children, a 2D option, they will take it. I can say that the film looks just fine in 2D, and Paramount bought just a little bit of goodwill for not making me have to track down a 2D theater not-so near me in order to take the family on opening night.
For Colored Girls (trailer) opened at the lower end of the Tyler Perry spectrum, which was pretty decent regardless. The all-star ensemble adaptation scored $19.4 million, or just about its $21 million budget, which is the third-lowest debut for Mr. Perry. For Colored Girls opened better than Daddy's Little Girls ($11 million) and The Family That Preys ($17 million). Basically it opened like a normal non-Madea Tyler Perry film despite being R-rated, 133 minutes long, and rather visually explicit about the kind of subject matter that Tyler Perry characters usually just talk about in past tense. It's not a home run, but it's still going to be a very profitable movie, even if it has a normal-for-Perry 2.2x-ish weekend-to-final multiplier. It's chances of being an Oscar contender are pretty remote at this point, thanks to the pointlessly harsh reviews (whatever your issues with Perry, it's a good, compelling, very-well acted piece of performance art). The best case scenario is that a few of the underemployed actresses featured (Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise, etc) get noticed and have more opportunities as a result.
For more box office news, including holdover updates and which film scored one of the biggest per-screen averages in history, read the rest of this article at Mendelson's Memos.