Incredibles 2 smashes box office records with £174 million opening

Incredibles 2 has smashed box office records with a blazing $231 million (around £174 million) opening worldwide.

In the US alone, it made $180 million, making it the biggest opening of all time for an animated movie.

It shattered the previous record, set by Finding Dory in 2016, which itself made a massive $135 million.

“The film shows the drawing power of the superhero genre, whether in the live action or animated realm,” box office analyst Paul Dergarbedian told Variety.

“The combination of the Pixar brand and Disney’s perfectly executed marketing and distribution strategy made the film an instant classic and a box office juggernaut.”

Critics have also hailed the movie, which currently boasts a 94% fresh rating on reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

For all that, director and writer Brad Bird, who also helmed the first movie, had said that he feared superhero fatigue was going to set in while making the movie.

Speaking about making the first film, he told Yahoo Movies in the US: “The field was lush. It was well manicured. No one had played on it much. Spider-Man was over there, and then way on the other side was X-Men. There was room for us to move. It was really nice.

“And now it’s like a crowded subway with no air.

“I was sitting there going, ‘In two years are people going to be sick to death of having superheroes every two seconds?’

“And then I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute, the reason I made the first movie was not to do superpowers, but to comment on family. And that’s still very rich.

“So once I sort of reassured myself that that was really the core of the movie, I felt like there’s a lot of new stuff to explore there.”

It appears his instincts were correct.

As well as now being the biggest animated opening ever, it’s the eighth biggest US opening of all time, beating Beauty and the Beast.

Though early days, it sets the movie on a likely billion-dollar course – Finding Dory made $1.029 billion in 2016.

The movie picks up the action immediately after the events of the first film, with Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson voicing Helen and Bob Parr, aka Elastigirl and Mr Incredible, parents to three kids also with super powers.

Samuel L. Jackson returns as Frozone, while Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener play Winston and Evelyn Deavor as business magnates hoping to revamp public perception of superheroes.

It’s out on July 13 across the UK.

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