‘Pets 2’ and ‘Dark Phoenix’ Top Weekend Box Office, Though Both Underperform

The weekend’s top twelve combined to outperform the same weekend last year by more than 43%, which means the year-to-year gap continues to close, but the weekend’s new releases both struggled mightily.

Universal and Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets 2 was unable to even deliver half of the opening the first film delivered just a few years ago, while Fox’s Dark Phoenix entered the weekend as the worst reviewed film in the X-Men franchise ever and, predictably, delivered the lowest opening weekend of the franchise.

At the top of the box office is Universal and Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets 2 with an estimated $47.1 million from 4,561 locations (the second widest opening ever only to Avengers: Endgame).

The performance is less than half of the original, 2016 film’s $104.3 million, which remains a record opening for an original, animated feature.

Heading into the weekend expectations weren’t exactly meteoric, with the studio

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