Finding Dory earned another whopping $17.4 million on its seventh day of release, crossing the $200m mark and ending its first week of release with $213.317m. That's a drop of just 3.7% from yesterday. Among all non-opening (or day two or day three) Thursdays, that's the 4th biggest such gross ever, behind only Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($27m on day 7 and $22m on day 14) and Jurassic World ($17.8m on day 7).
Comparatively, Jurassic World and The Dark Knight dropped 10% from their first Wednesdays while (random examples of big openers) Toy Story 3 dropped 3%, Inside Out rose 1%, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest dropped 12% and Minions dropped 17%. Among all seven-day totals, Finding Dory ranks 11th between The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Iron Man 3. The film made an insane $78.257m in its first four weekdays.
Now the only question is how big it goes on its second weekend. Conventional wisdom suggests a $60-$70 million frame, but that would actually be a bit low strictly in terms of comparative patterns. Jurassic World made 5.9x its Thursday number over its second weekend, Inside Out made 5.5x its Thursday figure while Toy Story 3 made "just" 4.5x its Thursday gross over its second Fri-Sun frame. Heck, even Minions made 5.3x its Thursday number while Monsters University earned 4.8x.
So yeah, a performance like Toy Story 3 gets the film a $79 million second weekend which would be the fourth biggest ever. A 5x figure gets it to $87m and past the $300m mark on Sunday. If it plays like Jurassic World, however unlikely, it snags a $102m second weekend and ends its tenth day with $313m (about on par with The Dark Knight). It's not fair because of the whole "school days" thing, but The Jungle Book made $5.5m on Thursday before a $61m second weekend.
So yeah, it would be a little odd for Finding Dory not to have an insane second weekend. Or maybe it's merely going to fall harder than normal for an animated/kid-friendly blockbuster and have to settle for $65 million and an over/under $280m ten-day cume. That's pretty great too, but don't be too surprised if the film continues to defy convention. As we've seen over the last four days, the film hasn't slowed down at all and continues to just keep swimming.
