Corona | Coming Attractions

The vampires of Twilight are no longer in top spot, having being replaced by a bald, animated Steve Carell-voiced supervillain. Universal's Despicable Me debuted in first place at the weekend box office. As the initial product for former 20th Century Fox executive Chris Meledandri's Illumination Entertainment, it's a great start. Suddenly Illumination is a player in the CG toon market and Carell has his own four quadrant franchise to mine in his post-The Office years.

Despicable Me took in an estimated $60.1 million dollars, a spectacular showing for a $70 million dollar budgeted film. With an opening like that, and amongst heavy competiton from Pixar's Toy Story 3, it's a certainty that we'll get to see a DM sequel in a couple of years.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse tumbled one spot to second place, grossing another $33.4m (the pic's total now stands at $237m, the second-highest grossing Twilight film to date.) In third place comes Predators, the modestly-budgeted sequel to John McTiernan's 1987 monster movie. Predators should be considered a success by its owners at Fox; with a budget of only $40 million, the sequel grossed $25.3m this weekend. Robert Rodriguez should be getting a call from Fox soon about developing Predators 2.

Toy Story 3 is now in fourth spot with $22 mil new bucks this weekend, bringing its domestic cume up to $340m. With that haul TS3 just became the highest-grossing Pixar movie to date, beating Finding Nemo's $339.7 accumulation. Toy Story 3 also just became the highest-grossing movie of the year, so far, and $400 million dollars domestic ain't out of reach for Woody and the gang.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender drops three positions to #5 ($17.1m new, $100.2m total), and with every dollar earned, building the chances for a sequel actually happening. Grown Ups, Adam Sandler's stunted adolescence streak continues but now it's in sixth place ($16.4m new, $111.3 total.) Knight & Day is limply earning more bread ($7.8m new, $61.9m total) and The Karate Kid remake is still hanging in there at #8 ($5.7m new, $164.6m total). The A-Team is in ninth spot ($1.8m new, $73.9m total) and Cyrus is tenth ($1.3m new, $3.5m total.)

This week's top six movies all took in decent-sized grosses and generated one of the better performing box office weekend of the summer of 2010. Now comes the big question mark of the season: Christopher Nolan's Inception. How is a brainy sci-fi movie going to fit in amongst the competition?