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Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterBox office watchers were worried that family audiences had all but forgotten about movie theaters… until Gru and his mischievous yellow friends came along. As it turns out, parents with young kids weren’t abandoning their local cinemas.

breaking a decade-old July 4th holiday-weekend box office record and becoming the 11th animated film in box office history and the first since “Frozen II” to earn an opening weekend of over $100 million. The “Minions” sequel tallied $125 million over the four-day holiday weekend, cementing the idea that family audiences feel comfortable returning the theaters in large numbers after a long pandemic-fueled lull.The $400 million global run of Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” this past spring was the first sign that family films were making a comeback, but the struggles of Disney/Pixar’s “Lightyear” last month created some doubt in Hollywood over whether the video game adaptation’s success was a fluke.

Families went bananas for Minions this weekend at the movie theater. “ Minions: The Rise of Gru ” brought in an estimated $108.5 million in ticket sales from 4,391 screens in North America, Universal Pictures said Sunday. By the end of the Monday’s July Fourth holiday, it will likely have earned over $127.9 million.

With the box office’s rebound just as 5K attendees are reconvening at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, exhibition and studios can rest easy knowing that there’s a return to a theatrical window. For most studios with tentpole fare, that’s 45-days, and for those titles with less commercial appeal or aimed at specialty audiences, it’s 17 days.

health of family moviegoing is especially good news for Hollywood as it heads into its lucrative summer season when films like Universal's own “Minions: Rise of Gru” and Walt Disney Co.'s “Lightyear” — the first Pixar film opening in theaters in two years — hope to approach pre-pandemic levels.“There's reason for being more than cautiously optimistic,” said Jim Orr, head of distribution for Universal. “I think audiences this summer are going to be flooding into theaters.”While studios have been hesitant to program many films against each other during the pandemic, the weekend saw a rarity: three new wide releases, all of them well-received, none of them sequels or remakes.“The Bad Guys,” based on Aaron Blabey's children's graphic novel series about a gang of crooked animals with a Quentin Tarantino-for-kids tone, fared well with critics (85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (an “A” CinemaScore).

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorScoring tickets to the first BTS concert in three years may be next-to-impossible, but plenty of fans of the global K-pop group were able to catch the Seoul-set show at their local cinema.In a rare, one-night-only event, HYBE and Trafalgar Releasing brought the concert to movie theaters across the country to blockbuster results. At the global box office, the limited engagement of “BTS Permission to Dance on Stage: Seoul” raked in $32.6 million from 3,711 cinemas in 75 worldwide theatrical markets.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Spider-Man: No Way Home” has officially unseated director James Cameron’s 2009 science-fiction epic “Avatar” to become the third-highest grossing domestic release in history.After weeks of speculation over whether or not Peter Parker had the legs to bump the people of Pandora from bronze, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected the remaining $1 million on Monday to push “Avatar” — and its mighty $760.5 million at the North American box office — to fourth place in the record books.Sony’s latest Spidey adventure, a culmination to Tom Holland’s web-slinging trilogy, has grossed a stunning $760.9 million at the domestic box office since launching exclusively in theaters in December. Those ticket sales are three times as much as the next highest-grossing movie of the pandemic era, which is Disney and Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” with $224 million.

The glamorous spies of “The 355” were no competition for the movie theater’s reigning webslinger.Spider-Man’s box office dominance continued in its fourth weekend in theaters, adding another $33 million, according to studio estimates on Sunday. With $668.8 million in North American ticket sales to date, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is now the sixth highest grossing release of all time domestically.

Gallery: The best serial killer movies ever made (Espresso)"Those Who Wish Me Dead," which finished the weekend in third place, wasn't the only new movie to open. "Spiral," a creepy addition to the terrifying "Saw" franchise, brought in $8.

Christopher Nolan’s new movie “Tenet” is slated to be the first big-budget film to hit theaters since the coronavirus shutdown, but will there be enough people in the seats in July for the movie to turn a profit?

The 27 March release date has been postponed in China

When the red carpet has been rolled away and the champagne has lost its fizz, does an Oscar justify its cost? The answer, more than ever, is probably yes, but not in the way Oscar's added value has traditionally been measured.Let's look at the domestic box office first. "The Oscar effect is different at the box office than it was back in the day," says Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian.