'Ice Age 4' To Be Released In Jam-Packed July 2012

It's hard to believe that a movie that didn't even make $200 million in the US nevertheless became one of the biggest films ever made. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs made more money than Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the Sith, and nearly 80% of that revenue came overseas.

Surprise, surprise -- we're getting a fourth movie. Not too many summer flicks make ten times as much as they cost to produce, so Fox, realizing how easy another huge payday would be, has scheduled the fourth movie, again in 3-D, to show up on July 13, 2012. That's a week before the third Batman movie, by the way, which was announced last week. And Spider-Man is out July 3rd that year. Together, the predecessors in the three series combined to make just under $2.8 billion. So that's a big month.

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'Up' Is Big Overseas, But Nowhere Near 'Ice Age' Big

Even though Pixar had its second-biggest domestic hit ever this summer with Up, it doesn't look likely that it will be the year's top animated movie. Up won the foreign box office markets this weekend, taking in an estimated $21.7 million, so now its international total has zoomed past $250 million.

That doesn't sound like a bunch of money when you think about the world at large, but The Hollywood Reporter tells us that's 3,500 theaters, so this is comparable to a solid but unspectacular weekend in the US for a number one movie. Considering how much money it's already made in foreign territories, though, it's a healthy amount. But generating global ticket sales likely in excess of $600 million isn't going to be good enough to leapfrog the astonishing success of Fox's Ice Age: Dawn on the Dinosaurs. We've charted that animated movie since it became clear that, despite its rather pedestrian summer run in America, it was going to be one of the biggest movies of any kind in the international marketplace.

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'Ice Age 3' Soars Up International Box Office List

In my review of Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs I wrote that it "moves pleasantly along, doesn’t make anyone think too hard, and looks good, even in 3-D. For 90 minutes, it gets your kids out of the heat." And that formula has definitely been successful: The animated flick is now the third-highest-grossing movie in history when you look at the international markets.

Ice Age made about $200 million here in the states but it's now over $660 million overseas, making it not only the third-biggest movie of the year internationally, but behind only Titanic and Return of the King in terms of foreign ticket sales. Phenomenal. It's still doing very well overseas, placing third on the international top ten last weekend and in the process surpassing both the third Pirates movie and the first Harry Potter entry to secure its place in history. Fox had already steered the film well beyond every other animated release ever internationally, and its percentage of foreign dollars versus domestic - less than 25% of its revenue comes from the US. It's now closing in on the top 15 movies in terms of total receipts, with about $850 million generated since July 1st.

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Summer 2009: The Opening Weekend is Overrated

We reported last week that this was a record summer for Hollywood, edging out 2008 by about $10 million. And it was an interesting mix of success stories and failures. As expected, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was the top choice for moviegoers...except you could argue that it really wasn't. Because if this summer proved anything, it's that the open weekend is overrated.

True, Transformers earned the most money, even though critics hated it. That brought the old argument back that people don't listen to reviewers and that they simply don't matter anymore, a sentiment echoed by G.I. Joe director Stephen Sommers in early August, when he did a victory lap over the film's number one opening. Both films are from Paramount, both films had big opening weekends, but neither film continued to perform to that level once the marketing died down. That's why the real winners from this summer are those films that continued to attract audiences well after the first three days and the millions of dollars spent on advertising. In my mind, there are five enormous hits that all played by these rules and really only two that survived by the opening weekend model, Transformers and Harry Potter. And it's great if you're on one of those teams, but most of the money this summer came from films that kept finding audiences weeks after the fact and were designed to do just that. Most movies that relied on opening weekends didn't meet the challenge: Wolverine, Terminator, G.I. Joe, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 were all disappointments. In order, those five movies that capitalized on word-of-mouth all summer long are The Hangover, Up, Star Trek, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and The Proposal. From where I sit, The Hangover was hands down the movie of the summer. It wasn't even supposed to win its opening weekend, but even though it surprised with $44 million in that frame, nobody, anywhere, thought it would make $200 million, much less $270 million to become the number two comedy and the number three R-rated movie ever released.

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'Ice Age 3' Passes Major Box Office Milestone

Trivia time: What is the highest-grossing animated film in foreign box office history? Who would have ever guessed it is now Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

It deserves some qualifiers. To begin with, the U.S. box office for Ice Age has been steady but not spectacular, so because of that, this will never become the highest-grossing animated film worldwide. For the foreseeable future, that will continue to be Shrek 2, with over $900 million it total ticket sales. But Ice Age has hit $732 million, which puts it within reach of The Lion King and maybe the third Shrek movie, close to the top 20 films ever made. But the real story here is the international markets, which comprise an almost unprecedented 75% of all tickets sold for the new Ice Age. We talked earlier this summer about Sony not investing that much into the U.S. release of Angels & Demons because it knew the real money was overseas; this film has a higher percentage of international box office than even that one.

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