In June, Cartoons Rule

So let's review: there are presently two cartoon features riding the great Wave of Popularity.

The newest cartoon entry, Tranformers Deux, gets trampled by critics, but robot fanciers trample the box office racing through the turnstiles to see it:

Paramount-DreamWorks' action-sequel "Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen" continued to dominate the box office Friday raking in $36.7 million and raising its running domestic cume to $125.9 million over three days.

The other cartoon, now entering its fifth week, is doing well too.

Disney-Pixar's "Up" nabbed fifth with $3.9 million, down 35% on 3,487 for a running B.O. in its fifth Friday of $241.1 million.

So as we can see, animation continues to thrive.  Up floats toward the $300 million domestic mark and Transformers breaks box office records, while Ice Age 3 hits the world movie marketplace on July 1st.

Things could be worse.

Add On: Transformers just misses grabbing the big five-day b.o. record from Dark Knight; as a consolation prize, it still ends up with a nice bit of change.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” grossed an estimated $201.2 million from 4,234 theaters at the domestic box office to score the best five-day haul ever after “The Dark Knight.”

“Transformers 2’s” worldwide cume through Sunday was a massive $387 million, one of the best global deubts (sic) of all time.

Domestically, “Transformers 2,” grossed $112 million for the weekend after earning $89.2 million in its first two days (pic opened Wednesday at 12:01 a.m.) ...

The other animated entries out there aren't doing too badly either.

Disney-Pixar’s “Up” also continued to shine, grossing an estimated $13 million from 3,487 runs to come in No. 4 in its fifth frame. Domestic cume through Sunday was $250.2 million--surpassing “Star Trek” to become the highest grossing film of the year domestically. “Star Trek’s” cume through Sunday was an estimated $246.2 million ...

Monster Vs. Aliens has picked up over the past week, increasing over a 100% in weekly domestic box office gross.   MvA now stands at a hair under $196 million.