Pixar’s latest movie ‘Cars 3’ debuted at the top of the box office charts in the US with a strong $53.5M, making it the 16th Pixar film to open in the number one position. Unfortunately, it is also the worst opening yet for the three-picture Cars franchise.
If there’s a silver lining for Disney, they should be happy that it steal received an A score from CinemaScore. Such a strong score means its possible that Cars 3 will have a decent second weekend too.
It’s been eight years since Cars 2, just enough enough time for another generation of young kids to grow into the age where playing with cars is fun. So having a new Cars film from Pixar will no doubt help Disney’s bottom line with all the merchandise sales.
Internationally, Cars 3 collected trophies worth $21.3M in 23 markets. That brings the total so far to $74.8M. With more overseas markets opening in the weeks to come, that number should strengthen.
As we said in our review, this is very much a return to form for Pixar and the Cars franchise. The goofy spy thriller of the second film is forgotten and the film returns to the emotional storytelling Pixar is known for.
If you saw Cars 3 this weekend what did you think? If you haven’t seen Pixar’s latest? Let us know why not and if you plan to see it soon.
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While the Cars franchise isn’t my favorite of the Pixar movies, I did decide to see it Thursday night before the official opening on Friday (I’ve found that a good time to see kid’s movies when you might be a slightly older “kid” who doesn’t want to necessarily deal with the potential of rowdy or talkative children- I did the same thing with Finding Dory and it was mostly college kids and 20somethings that night haha).
It was…. certainly not the message I was expecting from what I’d seen of the trailers and other marketing. Originally to me it seemed like they were going for a “millennials are awful” type thing with the introduction of the high-tech Jackson Storm- a character I thought was going to be in the movie a lot more than he was. “Newer, younger cars are coming onto the racing scene- what will our hero Lightning McQueen do?!” was sort of the direction I thought it was going to go in and stick with all the way through… But then it didn’t and it was amazing. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it yet.
Pixar managed to handle a story about how it’s OK to age and move on to new things ESPECIALLY if it makes room for the next generation to grow and blossom pretty darn well. I found it especially great that the car who took over for Lightning was not only a car that’d been told she’d never make it as a racer, experienced anxiety and doubt when first faced with her chance to make it came, and had basically given up on her dream… but also that it was a HER. I don’t follow or know much about the world of racing, but it does seem to be a boy’s club for the most part- in-universe and out in the real world (with the exception of Danica Patrick I think). So for the new girl to be a girl and to use both her knowldge of updated techniques and training as well as the more traditional things she picked up from Lightning was great to see as well.
The only problem that I keep running into with the Cars universe is the lack of answering some worldbuilding questions- and another character in this movie just made that more complicated. While I understand that the decision to have Doc Hudson die in the movie world was because his voice actor passed away between the first two movies, there’s a fairly significant (to me) question raised with the introduction of Smokey. Smokey trained Doc (and was at least that much older than him at that time), Doc crashed, Smokey didn’t hear from Doc for 50 years (I think I heard that right in the movie?), and then Doc passed away. And yet Smokey- and a decent number of Doc’s contemporaries- are still alive and fine enough to race through a forest at night among other things. So it really makes me wonder about how a car “dies” in this universe as well as (er…) the opposite question for where the new high-tech guys came from. It’s a kid’s movie yes but… it bugs me a little.
Overall though, I found it to be quite enjoyable. It had many more returning characters and call backs to the first movie than the *ahem* wreck (though still decent- Pixar at Pixar’s worst is still better than a lot of movies out there) that was Cars 2.
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