‘Ice Age 4’ tops weekend box office with sales of $46m

Washington: ‘Ice Age: Continental Drift’, the fourth film in the animated series, dominated the weekend box office with an estimated 46-million-dollar opening.

The 20th Century Fox is the fourth in the ‘Ice Age’ series and the first in 3-D, ABC News reported. The North America performance of ‘Continental Drift’ was on par with previous ‘Ice Age’ movies but well below the opening weekend of the second installment, ‘The Meltdown’, which opened with 68-million-dollars in 2006. The weekend was inevitably shadowed by two superheroes, coming a week after the debut of Sony’s Spider-Man reboot, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, and one week before the highly-anticipated Batman sequel, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. In its second week of release, ‘Spider-Man’ earned 35 million dollars, pushing it past 200 million dollars domestically. It earned nearly 67 million dollars overseas over the weekend, bringing its worldwide gross is now 521.4 million dollars. Seth MacFarlane’s R-rated comedy hit, ‘Ted’, which stars Mark Wahlberg and a talking teddy bear, added 22.1 million dollars in its third week for a total of 159 million dollars for Universal Pictures. But the weekend belonged to family films, which had three of the top 10 films at the box office. ‘Ice Age’ is the third animated blockbuster to debut at number 1 this summer, and the previous mega-cartoons — Pixar Animation’s ‘Brave’ and DreamWorks Animation’s ‘Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted’ — also padded their totals. In fourth place, ‘Brave’ added 10.7 million dollars to its 195.6-million-dollar domestic total, and the 10th place ‘Madagascar 3’ added 3.5 million dollars to its 203.7-million-dollar domestic total. The top 10 movies at the weekend box office were: Ice Age: Continental Drift – 46 million dollars The Amazing Spider-Man – 35 million dollars Ted – 22.1 million dollars Brave – 10.7 million dollars Magic Mike – 9 million dollars Savages – 8.7 million dollars Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection – 5.6 million dollars Katy Perry: Part of Me – 3.7 million dollars Moonrise Kingdom – 3.7 million dollars Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted – 3.5 million dollars ANI