The Foreign Steeple Chase

Animated features (and live-action movies with lots of animated effects) stomp large footprints across global box office.

Weekends Foreign Box Office -- (Global Totals)

The Hobbit 2 -- $58,000,000 -- ($756,634,422)

Frozen -- $52,500,000 -- (639,938,000)

Walking With Dinosaurs -- $11,300,000 -- ($83,983,593)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 -- $4,000,000 -- ($247,948,709)

The way Frozen is rolling up grosses around the world, it will likely be bumping up against Despicable Me 2 - sized totals before much longer. The crowded field of animated features does't appear to have cramped the fairy tale's muscular box office. And the trades remind us:

There were a handful of milestones at the international box office this weekend amongst studio pics, although total overseas grosses were down around 21% on the comparable year-ago frame when Life Of Pi was the top film.

This year, Warner Bros‘ The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug crossed the $500M mark internationally, adding $58M in 62 markets, on par with the first Hobbit in terms of weekend take. Smaug has been the top movie overseas since release and has an estimated overseas cume of $527M with continued No. 1s in Germany, Australia and the UK. Its domestic take is $230M for a total of about $767M worldwide. Two big markets to come for the film are China on February 21st and Japan on February 28th, although the latter is showing weaker returns for Hollywood fare overall.

Disney‘s Frozen surpassed $600M globally this weekend to make it the highest-grossing Disney Animation release of all time behind The Lion King. ...