DreamWorks Animation’s ‘Home’ Posed to Earn $53M This Weekend

Lately DreamWorks Animation has been weathering gloom and doom. The studio posted close to $300M in losses last year from flicks that failed to perform. They sold off their Glendale, CA campus and laid off 500 people. However, this weekend is looking a little brighter for DreamWorks Animation as their sole 2015 feature film Home, via 20th Century Fox, is leading the charge at the box office with an estimated $15M Friday and a $52.7M weekend. 

If those figures hold, Home will mark the best opening for a DreamWorks Animation title since June 2012's Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted ($60.3M), and will even inch out the bow of last summer's How to Train Your Dragon 2 ($49.45M), which wound up in the black with a profit of $107.34M (global B.O. $618.9M, production cost $145M). Home carries a reported lower budget than How to Train Your Dragon 2 with $130M.

Home's CinemaScore was an A, which is largely in line with the grades for DreamWorks Animation fare throughout 2014.

Two of the kingpins in Home's marketing have been pop stars Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez who respectively voice the daughter and mother who were separated from each other as aliens invade earth. Social media monitor RelishMix praises Rihanna's outreach to her 82.7M Facebook and 42.6M Twitter followers with trailers, teasers, selfies and mini-posters along with Lopez's promotions to her 43M FB, 31.4M TW and cross placement on her Vevo Channel. Further propelling Home before a mass audience, Lopez performed the pic's song "Feel the Light" on American Idol.