娱乐英语新闻:Animated film "Minions" dominates North American box office with 115.2 million dollars debu

LOS ANGELES, July 12 (Xinhua) -- Universal Pictures' "Minions" beat the sci-fi dinosaur movie "Jurassic World" at this weekend box office and was expected to rack up a 115.2 million U.S. dollars in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, which will be the second biggest animated film opening in history.

"Minions," the spinoff from "Despicable Me," was behind only to "Shrek the Third" for the latter's 2007's start with the 121.6 million dollars in tickets revenue. "Minions" cost 74 million dollars to make and opened at 4,301 locations, the most number of North American venues in Universal's history.

"Minions," the 3-D prequel to the "Despicable Me" franchise, scored 46.2 million dollars in Friday's box office, the best single day ever for a cartoon feature, according to Rentrak. It received a solid "A" rating from first-night moviegoers on CinemaScore. And critics gave a 54 percent of approval rate on RottenTomatoes.

The audience breakdown for "Minions" skewed towards female and young moviegoers: 59 percent of the audiences were female and moviegoers under the age of 25 made up 55 percent. Family audiences made up 60 percent of the film's overall audience.

Universal also claimed the second place this weekend as " Jurassic World" added 18.1 million dollars to its 590.6 million dollars in ticket sales in North America over its five-week race at the box office, which leaves it just 9.4 million dollars away from becoming the fourth film ever to reach the 600 million dollars box office milestone in U.S. and Canada.

"Jurassic World" was down a very solid 38 percent from last weekend's performance. "Inside Out" was ranked the third, again just behind the Jurassic critters, with an estimated 17.1 million dollars. The 3D computer animated blockbuster from Disney and Pixar was down 42.5 percent from last weekend and gathered 283.6 million dollars of tickets sales in North America in 24 days.

Rounding out the rest seven of top ten movies in the United States and Canada were "Terminator Genisys" (13.7 million dollars), "The Gallows" (10 million), "Magic Mike XXL" (9.6 million), "Ted 2 " (5.6 million), "Self/Less" (5.4 million), "Max" (3.4 million) and "Spy" (3 million).