‘How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World’ topped the North American box office for a second week, but close on its tail was Tyler Perry’s final instalment of the ‘Madea’ franchise. Driven by a largely female audience, ‘A Madea Family Funeral’ had a better-than-expected debut.
The third instalment in the ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ series grossed an estimated $30 million (Dh110.18 million) this weekend according to Universal Pictures on Sunday, bringing its domestic total just shy of $100 million. Worldwide, the DreamWorks Animation film has made over $375 million. In China alone it opened in first place with $33.4 million.
‘A Madea Family Funeral’ took second place at the domestic box office with an estimated $27 million, a third best for the 15-year-old franchise. The ‘Madea’ films have never been all that popular with critics — this one splattered out with a 24 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes — but audiences have never seemed to care. This time around the audience, which was 67 per cent female and 78 per cent over the age of 25, gave the film a solid A- CinemaScore.
“That character just resonates,” said comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “These films are absolutely critic proof. The audience has spoken and they love Madea and they’re saying goodbye.”
Further down the charts, the Neil Jordan stalker-thriller ‘Greta’, starring Isabelle Huppert and Chloe Grace Moretz, opened in eighth place to a mediocre $4.6 million.
“Greta was just another newcomer released in 2019 that had a rough go in a slow marketplace,” Dergarabedian said. “This might have benefited from a platform release given the subject matter and the cast.”
