Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Box Office: “Despicable Me” Makes $100 Mil More than “Lone Ranger”

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Imagine this scenario: “Despicable Me 2” opened on Wednesday, same as “The Lone Ranger.” And now the former film has made just about $100 million more than the latter. Yikes. “The Lone Ranger” will finish today with approximately 48.3 million. That’s at least $12 million less than Disney hoped for at the high, and over a million less than their low.

Oh well — the writing was on the wall when everyone saw the movie early last week. “Despicable Me 2” now has almost $300 million internationally, making it a welcome relief for Universal Pictures. But for Disney, as everyone has now noted, this is a serious disaster with repercussions.

But this is the summer of disasters. Just look at “White House Down” and “After Earth.” You can only hope that scripts, not just budgets, will be looked at a lot more closely in the future for big studio releases.

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedmanhttps://www.showbiz411.com
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009 and previously edited Fame magazine and wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. is articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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