'Cars 2' Box Office Easily Overwhelms Rotten Reviews

"Cars 2" has to be better at the box office than the review scores. That is a rare kind of consolation for Pixar, since "Cars 2" may be the first movie of its with big box office in spite of lousy reviews. History was made this week when the sequel became Pixar's first critically panned movie. But although the studio's winning streak with critics is decidedly over, its streak of No. 1 films still goes on and on.

According to Deadline Hollywood, the movie overcame its increasingly disappointed review buzz to make $28 million on Friday. In fact, the website projects its weekend box office could be as high as $75 million, which would defy all expectations.

These results are in decided contrast with last week's No. 1 movie, Green Lantern. The superhero epic also had extremely rotten reviews, and its opening weekend totals suffered as a result. Instead of making close to $60 million last week, it got over $50 million, which only highlighted its critical pans and disappointing reactions.

By that logic, there should be an even greater backlash against Cars 2, which is the first movie in Pixar history to get rotten reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, its scores sunk all the way to 33 percent, which was over 40 percent below the original Cars -- the previous worst Pixar film of all time.

Yet unlike Green Lantern, this No. 1 movie thrived and had an audience that ignored critics. Of course, Green Lantern didn't have the Pixar brand, wasn't the first film of an uncertain franchise and didn't bring in a long line of kids and adults. Therefore, it was much more vulnerable to bad scores than Cars 2 was, even though it may be less of a disappointment to critics and fans by comparison.

Nevertheless, Pixar and Disney have big bucks to balance out the critical pans, although time will tell if it is enough of a consolation. Other studios could ignore the bad write-ups, focus on the box office, and keep going forward as if nothing went wrong. But considering Pixar's brand, and how it took a hit for the first time, it may not want to move forward so easily.

In any case, Cars 2 has to clean up while it can, given the huge competition coming on the Fourth of July. In fact, it will be supplanted at the box office as soon as Wednesday, when Transformers: Dark of the Moon gets an early release date. It won't take away much of the family audience, yet it should overwhelm the field anyway, no matter what critics wind up saying.

Sources

Deadline Hollywood- "VA VROOM! Cars 2 Revs $28M Friday For $75M Weekend"

Rotten Tomatoes- "Cars 2"