The Bad Guys 2 & KPop Demon Hunters Box Office ( Photo Credit – YouTube )
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As the summer season edges toward its curtain call, the box office charts tell a curious story at development in Hollywood. This window may have easily birthed the year’s highest-grossing title, but the studio once defined by dominance looks awkwardly caught between fading hits and newer rivals redefining momentum.
Disney, despite flashes of power from the inevitable mountain climbed by Lilo & Stitch, keeps finding its follow-through efforts running into walls, whereas it is Netflix that just witnessed its first summer blockbuster to top the weekend box office stateside.
The Bad Guys 2 vs Elio: A Chase Across the Finish Line
Universal’s animated sleeper, The Bad Guys 2, skimmed another $5.1 million in its fourth weekend at the domestic box office. That push brought its North American cume to $66.1 million, a figure that tells a story of substantially constructive footfalls while rival projects fall flat week by week. Ahead lies an open slate in the fall calendar, one that should easily carry it past Disney’s Elio within days.
At the domestic box office, Elio counts $72.9 million, and worldwide the film collected $150.6 million (according to Box Office Mojo), but Universal’s crafty animals now snap right at its heels. Globally, the race is already tighter. With The Bad Guys 2 standing at $149 million worldwide — the difference of merely a million dollars — the milestone of overtaking Disney’s sci-fi venture comes as early as Tuesday.
For a company that once treated animated supremacy as a default, this feels like another bruise. Yes, Disney still waves the banner of billion-dollar might thanks to Elio and the unstoppable Lilo & Stitch. Yet the next rung on that ladder, Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, is shifting toward a finish of about half a billion. That propels five other films to slide in between, pushing Marvel’s relaunch down to the middle shelf, in addition to a handful of animated films beating Disney and Pixar.
The Bad Guys 2 Box Office Summary
Domestic – $66.1 million
International – $82.9 million
Worldwide – $149.1 million
Elio Box Office Summary
Domestic – $72.9 million
International – $77.7 million
Worldwide – $150.6 million
KPop Demon Hunters: A Limited Release That Refuses to Be Small
If a film could incite conversations beyond its size, KPop Demon Hunters’ special sing-along event materialized this weekend. The feature opened with $18 million, only a hair’s breadth behind Elio’s milquetoast $20.8 million, and it did so with just 1,700 screens, topping the chart in the meantime.
Unlike its Disney counterpart, however, this run merely keeps it eligible for awards chatter. Netflix rolled it out on the platform more than a month earlier, and it has already surged into a spot among the streamer’s most-viewed titles in history.
The theatrical launch has since layered over that success and pulled in fans who felt worn out by Pixar’s bean-mouth design trend. The energy inside those packed houses signals that even when a story exists online in abundance, theaters can still rattle with cheers if an audience feels recognized in a way studios too often forget.
Additionally, a frequent reminder by social media to Disney is to work on its animation and perhaps move on from its ancient visual styles — which many refer to as “bean mouth” — and adapt changes like the fusion of 2D and 3D animations of Spiderverse and KPop films.
Note: Box office numbers are attributed to estimates from various sources. Numbers have not been independently verified by Koimoi.
