Pixar’s Hoppers Debuts At #1 In America With Record-Breaking Box Office Haul (Sunday Update)

UPDATE: 2026/03/08 07:58 EST BY BRENNAN KLEIN

Hoppers Massively Improves On Saturday’s Already Superb $40 Million Projections While The Bride! Sinks Below Its $8-10 Million Range

This article was originally written Saturday AM and has been updated Sunday AM with up-to-date box office projections (in bold). Scroll down for a full chart and further analysis.

Hoppers is bouncing to the top of the chart.

Pixar’s Hoppers, which is set to break a box office record this weekend, is a sci-fi adventure about a wildlife researcher (Piper Curda) who transfers her consciousness into a robot beaver and accidentally foments an animal revolution. The star-studded voice cast of the movie includes three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep alongside Dave Franco, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, and SNL alums Bobby Moynihan, Vanessa Bayer, Melissa Villaseñor, and Ego Nwodim.

Per Deadline, as of Sunday morning, Hoppers is projected to debut at No. 1 with a 3-day total of $45 million at the domestic box office. It is set to handily outpace fellow new release The Bride!. The Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed Bride of Frankenstein riff is projected to earn a 3-day domestic total of $7.3 million during its own opening weekend.

This sees Hoppers earning the biggest domestic opening weekend for a Pixar original movie in the 2020s. In fact, it’s their biggest since 2017’s Coco debuted with $50.8 million. It’s beating Onward ($39.1 million), Elemental ($29.6 million), Elio ($20.8 million), and the COVID-compromised productions Turning Red ($578,047), Soul ($431,840), and Luca (N/A).

Additionally, Hoppers is earning the second-best Pixar debut overall for the decade so far, only falling behind their Toy Story spinoff Lightyear, which had a $50.6 million bow.

Overall, Hoppers is set to become Pixar’s 11th highest-grossing original domestic debut, beating out 2015’s The Good Dinosaur ($39.1 million). Below, see a breakdown of the studio’s Top 10 original domestic debuts of all time:

Title	Domestic Debut	Worldwide Box Office
Inside Out (2015)	$90.4 million	$858.3 million
The Incredibles (2005)	$70.5 million	$631.4 million
Finding Nemo (2003)	$70.2 million	$871 million
Up (2009)	$68.1 million	$735.1 million
Brave (2012)	$66.3 million	$539 million
WALL·E (2008)	$63.1 million	$521.3 million
Monsters, Inc. (2001)	$62.6 million	$528.8 million
Cars (2006)	$60.1 million	$462 million
Coco (2017)	$50.8 million	$814.6 million
Ratatouille (2007)	$47 million	$623.7 million

This strong performance may have been bolstered by glowing Hoppers reviews that have earned it a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 94% alongside a matching Verified Hot audience score of 94% on the Popcornmeter. The movie also recently earned a near-perfect CinemaScore of A, far surpassing The Bride!‘s C+.

It ultimately remains to be seen how high the new movie can climb by the end of the Hoppers release, but animated features tend to have slow and steady growth. If it has a similar multiplier to Elemental, which legged out to a gross of $496.4 million worldwide, it could easily climb to a worldwide gross of more than $650 million by the end of its run.

If Hoppers is able to hit that benchmark, it will rocket past its estimated break-even point of $375 million, which is probably necessitated by its robust reported budget of $150 million.

This Weekend’s Domestic Box Office Top 5

Below, see the full domestic Top 5 chart for the weekend:

#	Title	3-Day Total	Cumulative (Domestic)
1	Hoppers	$45 million	$45 million (weekend 1)
2	Scream 7	$16.3 million	$92.3 million (weekend 2)
3	The Bride!	$7.3 million	$7.3 million (weekend 1)
4	GOAT	$6.1 million	$83.3 million (weekend 4)
5	Wuthering Heights	$3.7 million	$78.7 million (weekend 4)

The movie that prevented The Bride! from debuting at No. 2 is the holdover title Scream 7. While the horror sequel debuted with the best opening weekend of the franchise, it is now crashing with a 74% sophomore weekend drop, which is by a wide margin the worst of the franchise.

Scream and the new releases have finally pushed two holdover hits out of the Top 3, with GOAT falling from No. 2 to No. 4 while Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights drops from No. 3 to No. 5. Both movies are in the fourth weekends of their respective runs.

Meanwhile, both of the concert movies that filled out the chart last weekend have departed the Top 5. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert has fallen from No. 5 to No. 9 with a 62% drop in the second weekend of its wide expansion.

The movie that beat EPiC for No. 4, Twenty One Pilots: More Than We Ever Imagined – Live in Mexico City, is off the chart entirely because it was only in theaters for a one-weekend engagement.

Overall, in spite of some disappointing results for the horror genre, Hoppers is leading the weekend to a cumulative domestic total of roughly $98 million, which is a massive 76% improvement over the same frame last year. It remains to be seen if it can pull off a similar feat next weekend, when the new releases Reminders of Him and Undertone are both expected to both debut below $15 million.

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