Illumination-Universal’s bad-boy comedy adventure Despicable Me 3 has officially joined the $1 billion box office club. The milestone was hit at the start of the weekend, with Thursday’s take bringing in an additional $741.4M internationally and $259.05M domestically.
DM3 is the third title of 2017 to reach the billion-dollar mark, following Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast and Universal’s The Fate of the Furious.
Last month, the latest film’s performance pushed the four-film set (which includes Minions) to the worldwide top-grossing animated franchise position, surpassing DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek; and the top-grossing animated franchise at the international box office, outdoing Fox/Blue Sky’s Ice Age.
Illumination has developed quite the track record with its animated features, which combined have grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide. DM3 is its second film to take in more than $1B and its third to surpass $900M.
Disney’s Frozen maintains the top spot for animated features on the worldwide box-office charts with $1.276B, followed by Minions ($1.159B), Pixar’s Toy Story 3 ($1.067B), Pixar’s Finding Dory ($1.028B), Disney’s Zootopia ($1.023B) and DM3 at No. 6. The top 10 is filled out by Despicable Me 2 ($970M), The Lion King ($968M), Finding Nemo ($940M) and Shrek 2 ($919M).
