Weekend Box Office: 'Big Hero 6' Cruises Past 'Interstellar'

Conquering one of Hollywood’s most revered directors, Disney’s original animated tentpole Big Hero 6 blasted past Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar to win the domestic box office race with $56.2 million from 3,761 theaters.

Coming in slightly behind expectations, Interstellar grossed $50 million from 3,561 locations, putting its five-day debut at $52.2 million for partners Paramount and Warner Bros. Per Nolan’s wishes, the film opened two days early in 250 theaters equipped to project in film.

Interstellar began playing everywhere Thursday evening after its Tuesday night launch, and Paramount is including $2.7 million in late-night runs in its weekend estimate of $50 million (it earned a total of $3.5 million on Thursday). Without that, the weekend total would be $47.3 million. It’s industry practice for studios to include Thursday night numbers in the weekend number, although this situation is different, in that Interstellar had already debuted, albeit in limited runs.

The movie’s running time — at 169 minutes, it is Nolan’s longest film — is no doubt hurting the bottom line. Interstellar marks Nolan’s lowest domestic opening since The Prestige in 2006 ($14.8 million), and is the first of his films since Insomnia in 2002 not to come in No. 1.

Interstellar also has divided critics, and earned a B+ CinemaScore, compared to an A for Big Hero 6, which runs 105 minutes. Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts trying to save the human race, with the ensemble cast also including Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine.

Related: Into the Wormhole With Christopher Nolan

Pre-release tracking showed Interstellar generating at least as much interest as last year’s space epic Gravity, which debuted to $55.8 million. And Nolan’s last non-Dark Knight movie, Inception, grossed $62.8 million when it opened in July 2010, but Paramount insiders note that Inception had the advantage of playing in summer.

Paramount has the movie domestically, while Warners is handling its release overseas, where Interstellar launches in almost every market this week and weekend, save for China (Nov. 12), Japan (Nov. 22) and Venezuela (Dec. 5). Weekend numbers weren’t immediately available.

As fate would have it, Interstellar and Big Hero 6 both cost $165 million to make, so need to do hefty business globally.

Big Hero 6's performance is another victory for Disney Animation Studios after Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph.

Inspired by Marvel characters, the family film chronicles the special bond that develops between Baymax (Scott Adsit), a plus-sized inflatable robot, and robotics prodigy HiroHamada (Ryan Potter), who transforms Baymax and his adrenaline-seeking friends into a band of high-tech heroes determined to help the city of San Fransokyo.

Jamie Chung, T.J. Miller, Maya Rudolph, Daniel Henney, Damon WayansJr., Genesis Rodriguez, James Cromwell and Alan Tudyk also lend their voices to the 3D movie.

Big Hero 6 is directed by Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt), and produced by Roy Conli (Tangled).

If Sunday’s estimates hold, this weekend will be only the fourth time in history that two films sharing the marquee have opened to $50 million or more. In all three previous instances, they were an animated and live-action movie — Monsters University and World War Z; Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Prometheus; and Wall-E and Wanted — and in all three cases, the animated offering won.

At the specialty box office, Focus Features’ awards contender The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as a young Stephen Hawking, is performing nicely in its limited launch and could finish the weekend with a theater average of $40,000 or better. It’s playing in five theaters in New York and Los Angeles.

Watch the trailer for Big Hero 6 below: