'The Bob's Burgers Movie' Is Disney's Most Successful 2D Release Since 'The Princess And The Frog'

Disney’s The Bob’s Burger’s Movie opened at #3, earning a modest $15 million (estimated) over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, with $12.6m of that amount posted over the standard weekend period.

While the Fox tv series spinoff proved no match for Top Gun: Maverick, which is headed to a $150m+ opening, it did best the Walt Disney Company’s last theatrical 2d animation effort, 2011’s Winnie the Pooh, which opened with $7.9m. The last time Disney put out a better-performing 2d feature was The Princess and the Frog, which launched wide with a $24.2m weeekend back in 2009.

The Bob’s Burgers opening is also a far cry from The Simpsons Movie, another Fox 2d series spinoff that launched with $74m a decade-and-a-half ago, but as Deadline points out, Bob’s Burgers is a niche franchise with a weekly series average of roughly 1.3 million viewers. Around 1.1 million people paid to see the film in theaters over the Fri-Sun period, which is a fair number considering the show’s limited appeal.

Notable for a Disney animation release, Bob’s Burgers attracted a primarily adult audience with 89% of viewers aged 18 and older. But don’t hold your breath for more 2d animated features from Disney. While it’s true that Bob’s Burgers was financed, produced, and distributed by Disney, the film came to the company via its merger with Fox back in 2019. The existence of this project as a Disney release is more a circumstance of corporate affairs than a change in sentiment at the corporation about the viability of theatrical 2d animation.

Some have also pointed out to us that the film shouldn’t be compared alongside Disney’s traditional 2d films because it isn’t a fully hand-drawn feature. It’s true that The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a mix of puppeted-2d animation and hand-drawn animation sequences, but at the end of the day, it’s still a 2d feature. In any case, it’ll likely be another long while until Disney releases either a fully-hand-drawn 2d or partly-drawn 2d feature, since their management is unwavering in their misguided belief that audiences only want cg animation.

Other animation notables in the North American top 10 over the extended holiday weekend: Dreamworks Animation’s The Bad Guys landed in the #5 spot with $6.15m (est.), lifting its six-week total to $82.9m, while Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 came #7 with $3.1m and an eight-week cume of $185.7m.

‘The Bob’s Burgers Movie’ Is Disney’s Most Successful 2D Release Since ‘The Princess And The Frog’

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