Minions & Monsters is tracking for a franchise-low July 4th opening around $80 million

Universal and Illumination sent Minions & Monsters into theaters on Wednesday, and the tracking that came back for its first weekend is the softest a Minions movie has ever posted over the Fourth of July. Analysts have it landing around $80 million across the five-day holiday frame, with the spread between the studio and its rivals running anywhere from $60 million to $90 million. Four years ago, Minions: The Rise of Gru opened north of $120 million on the same weekend. This one is tracking for roughly two-thirds of that, and the reviews are better.

That gap is mostly a calendar problem, not a Minions problem.

The Saturday nobody booked a matinee for

July 4 lands on a Saturday this year, which sounds like a gift and is actually a tax. Saturday is normally the biggest moviegoing day of the week. This Saturday, it is the day the country throws itself a 250th birthday party. A lot of people will be at barbecues and on lawns waiting for fireworks, not in a dark room with a $19 ticket. Box office trackers have been flagging the holiday-on-a-Saturday problem for weeks, and the projections reflect it. Even the movie built to own this weekend is expected to leave money on the table.

Minions & Monsters, doing fine and still short

Universal is opening the film in roughly 4,000 theaters, and the global picture looks healthier than the domestic one, with overseas grosses pushing the worldwide weekend toward $170 million. For most releases that would be a clean win. For a Minions movie over the Fourth, it is a step down, and it is the rare case of a franchise entry posting its best reviews and its smallest holiday opening in the same breath. The yellow guys are not the problem. The date is.

Young Washington counter-programs the birthday

Angel Studios read the same calendar and went the other way. Young Washington, Jon Erwin's film about George Washington's years in the French and Indian War, opened July 3 aimed squarely at the anniversary crowd. The projections are all over the place, from a cautious $10 million weekend to north of $30 million, with a $15 million to $20 million four-day debut looking like the middle of the road. The cast is deeper than the marketing lets on: William Franklyn-Miller in the lead, with Mary-Louise Parker, Kelsey Grammer, Andy Serkis, and Ben Kingsley around him. Reviews have split, and some critics have knocked the film's use of generative AI in its production. Whether the 250th turns it into an Angel Studios breakout or just a well-timed classroom video is the weekend's real question mark.

Behind them, the holdovers

Supergirl is the cautionary tale sitting one row back. After a $38 million debut that came in under a third of Superman's opening, it is looking at a second-weekend drop of around 60 percent, the kind of fall that ends a movie's theatrical conversation fast. Toy Story 5, which has been running the table since it opened, is the steadier body in the top five and will keep pulling the family audience Minions is chasing.

What to watch

The number to watch is not whether Minions wins the weekend. It will. It is whether the whole market comes in soft, and by how much, because a down Fourth of July drags on the summer's running total. 2026 has been pacing toward a $10 billion domestic year. A holiday weekend that misses its own tracking would be the first real test of whether that pace holds into the back half of July, when Nolan's Odyssey and a run of big titles are supposed to carry it.