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Now even more Icy

Kim Hollis: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs opened to $41.7 million over the holiday weekend, with a five-day tally of $66.7 million. Should Fox be satisfied with this result? How about if we factor in the $148 million it made internationally this week?

Scott Lumley: That is a mind boggling amount of money for a franchise that I felt was already done. I imagine the mood at Fox shifted rapidly from mild excitement to stunned exhilaration after the foreign numbers rolled in.

Also, I believe Ice Age 4 was just greenlit. There isn't a script, cast, director or animation team yet, but this is now firmly on the schedule for somewhere in late 2011, I'll bet.

Tim Briody: Scott, you thought the Ice Age franchise was done? After The Meltdown made $195 million domestically and $651 million worldwide? Really? The buzz felt non-existent but then again nobody here is the target audience. With nothing that qualifies as direct competition except Harry Potter coming any time soon, it now gets the benefit of summer legs.





Scott Lumley: Hey, I've seen both movies, and I just felt the whole thing was pretty much done. The original Ice Age was amusing, but The Meltdown was really not good. I honestly suspected a severe market correction here. Obviously I was wrong.

Kim Hollis: Scott, what I think your mistake is here is that you're basing your expectations for box office performance on your own personal opinion of the second film. It was 57% fresh at RottenTomatoes, so there were certainly plenty of people who liked it well enough. And it solidly hits the kid demographic - it's not quite so mature as Up, and with Potter looking to up the ante on the seriousness as well, it's one of the few real choices for families with smaller kids. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs beat tracking estimates, and I have to think that Fox is generally pleased. The budget is $90 million, and they're easily making that back.

Josh Spiegel: Well, even though the worldwide numbers are impressive, it surprised me a bit that this third Ice Age movie wasn't even able to make in its first five days what Ice Age: The Meltdown was able to make in three. Yes, there are certainly many variables to consider; Ice Age 2 didn't have nearly as much competition as Ice Age 3, the weekend wasn't nearly as weak for the second film as it was for this one. However, Ice Age 3 did have the 3-D boost to help it along, and if you compare it to Pixar's Up, a movie that didn't hold that well this weekend, it was also unable to match the balloon movie's three-day take in its first five days. Obviously, the series is still going to be profitable for a fourth film (even though I'm not sure how long they can stretch a series of movies about characters who ended up extinct in real life), but this number is good, but not nearly as good as it could have been.

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