Box Office: ‘Despicable Me 4’ and Nicolas Cage’s ‘Longlegs’ Prosper, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Struggles In Liftoff

Nicholas Cage in Neon’s ‘Longlegs.’

Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection

Animation continues to the be hero of the summer office thanks to Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2, but others should take a bow as well.

From Illumination and Universal, DM4 is on course to top the domestic chart in its second weekend with $44 million for a global cume of $441 million through Sunday. On Friday, the Despicable Me/Minions franchise crossed $5 billion in global tickets, a feat no animated franchise has achieved before. (Earlier this week, Illumination announced that a Minions 3 is in the works.)

The big surprise of the weekend is the better-than-expected performance of writer-director Osgood Perkins Longlegs, a serial killer chiller starring Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe. The tense FBI procedural is headed for a second-place finish with a hefty $20 million to $23 million opening, a record start for Tom Quinn‘s Oscar-winning specialty production and distribution outfit Neon. The well-reviewed movie earned $10 million on Friday alone, including previews.

Holding at No. 3 in its fifth weekend is the record-shattering Inside Out 2, which now has a shot at becoming the top-grossing animated film of all time. It’s already become the top-grossing Pixar title of all time, not adjusted for inflation.

Paramount’s holdover A Quiet Place: Day One continues to entice moviegoers and is holding at No. 4. It is expected to scare up another $12 million this weekend for a domestic total of $165 million through Sunday.

Apple Original Films‘ continues its theatrical ambitions with the release of director Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. The period space-age movie, distributed by Sony on behalf of Apple, is struggling in its liftoff with an expected opening in the $10 million range (that could change if traffic is heavier than anticipated on Saturday and Sunday). The movie has earned meh reviews, but audiences were kinder in bestowing the older-skewing film an A- CinemaScore. Reviews matter more to older moviegoers, upon whom Berlanti’s film is relying (in moviespeak, “older” means someone over the age of 35).

At the specialty box office, new offerings include A24‘s Sing Sing, which is on course to score a solid per-theater average of $37,000 or thereabouts from four theaters in Los Angeles and New York. The film chronicles an arts program at the infamous Sing Sing prison.

Numbers will be updated Sunday.