It took a guy living in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea to knock out long-running champ American Sniper from the top spot at the box office this weekend.
Opening wide on Friday, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water beat pretty much all predictions to post a $56 million domestic gross in its opening weekend. Overseas, the Nickelodeon and Paramount Animation production earned $26.8 million for an impressive $82.8 million worldwide opening-weekend gross.
That far outstrips 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which opened with $32 million domestic and grossed $85 million domestic and $140 million worldwide.
Sniper slipped to second place with $24 million for the weekend, leaving third place for the opening of the most-recent movie from the Wachowski siblings: Jupiter Ascending. The sci-fi movie from the creators of The Matrix earned some unflattering reviews, but opened with a $19 million domestic and a $32 million foreign gross for $51.5 million total.
Meanwhile, Paddington continues to be the little movie that could, landing in fifth place for the weekend with a $5.4 million domestic gross. The film has sold $57 million in tickets domestically, adding to its robust foreign gross of $151 million for a total of $208 million for the hybrid production.
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