EAP Films and Theatres Private Limited - News

Film Review: ‘Star Trek Beyond’

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:28:47 +0530

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why director Justin Lin was handed the reins of the “Star Trek” series from the outgoing J.J. Abrams. Lin, the director of four “Fast and Furious” films, is a virtuoso at making vehicles fly through space, and his “Star Trek Beyond” has a few of the most spectacular set pieces ever seen in the series. What’s more, if you had to find a theme in the “Fast and Furious” films — apart from their real theme, which is that speed and destruction rock — it would be this: A motley crew of multiculti ego-driven auto pilots works best when they make themselves into a team. Yet it’s not until the halfway point of “Star Trek Beyond” when Lin stages a sequence that truly seems to get his juices flowing.

We’re in the jagged wilderness of a foreign planet, where the Enterprise has crash-landed after being cut in two by a swarm of metallic space “bees.” The swirling bees are controlled by Krall (Idris Elba), a dictator with the face of a lizard and the voice of a warlord and an attitude to match. He gets energy by literally sucking the life out of people, and he’s out to capture an artifact that was on board the Enterprise, an ancient clicking doohickey he wants for terrible (but unspecified) reasons. The crew of the Enterprise, dispersed on the planet, is trying to regroup, and now, at last, they have it together enough to launch a plan of attack. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) provides the diversionary activity, riding a chopper around Krall’s woodland headquarters, his biker image literally multiplied a dozen times. Meanwhile, a leonine alien named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), whose black-etched-on-white face makes her look like Darth Maul by MAC Cosmetics, engages in hand-to-hand combat with Krall, whomping him with kung fu kicks.

The sequence has that Lin spin, that overdose of activity that gets you pumped. And that’s a good thing — or, at least, it’s good up to a point — because “Star Trek Beyond,” for all the addictive intensity of its visual flourishes, is the most prosaic and, in many ways, the least adventurous of the Abrams-era “Star Trek” outings. It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe: The fact that Kirk and his crew spend a good part of the film stranded, without recourse, gives “Star Trek Beyond” a wide-eyed, slightly clunky analog stasis that takes us right back to the spirit of the TV series. Like the show, it lets us share quality time with cast members who now seem like old friends. Yet to say that the movie fails to break new ground would be putting it mildly. It truly feels like an extended episode, without a single “Oh, wow!” trick up its sleeve, which may be why, until the eye-popping climax, it’s more earnest than exciting.

To be fair, a “Star Trek” movie — this is the 13th — can’t be expected to reinvent the wheel each time. Abrams already did that once, and he did it brilliantly, casting the series with such an acute eye for the inner qualities of every “Trek” crew member that you almost feel as if each character should come with a little book entitled “The Zen of Scotty,” “The Zen of Bones,” etc. Yet the dimension of the original series that turned fans into lifelong cultists is that it pushed and poked boundaries; it kept spinning your head. That’s what Abrams tried to do in his two films, and the underrated “Star Trek Into Darkness,” though it played a bit of a shell game with “Trek” mythology, casting Benedict Cumberbatch as a young Khan who didn’t completely parse as the Khan of legend, was still a movie that took you on a sinister cosmic joyride.

“Star Trek Beyond” might have been more accurately entitled “Star Trek Contained.” It’s got a very familiar, old-fangled, no-mystery structure, and that’s because it’s basically the “Star Trek” version of an interplanetary action film, with a plot that doesn’t take you to many new frontiers. But there’s plenty of chance to hang out with a cast that audiences have — rightly — come to love. On the planet, the crew members land in different places because they’ve escaped the crashing Enterprise in separate pods. It’s fun to watch Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Bones (Karl Urban) bond through their antipathy. Or Scotty (Simon Pegg) try to weave his nerd weaselness around the forceful Jaylah, the alien dominatrix in white who refers to him as “Montgomery Scotty.” Or Anton Yelchin’s Chekov simply be, in every scene, his ardently antic Chekov self, which allows us to revel in what an inspired job the late young actor did of making Chekov’s face match his heavily accented words, his eyes popping in comic communion with his vowels. Yelchin, a superb actor (he is honored in the closing credits with a simple “For Anton”), slyly disappeared inside this role, and in that very act of disappearance he was never more himself.

Conveniently, the planet houses the carcass of an old Federation ship, the U.S.S. Franklin, which our mighty crew can resuscitate. From there, the battle heads to Yorktown, a Federation outpost that’s like a gyroscopic steel-and-glass city that resembles an amalgam of the aristocratic satellite in “Elysium,” the city of the future in “WALL-E,” and an Apple store. It’s a lurching, multi-planed vertiginous place, and Lin stages the protracted final battle there like a gladiatorial contest suspended in the air. It’s a sequence you won’t soon forget.

What is forgettable, perhaps, is everything else about the movie, which doesn’t so much advance the “Trek” cosmology as keep it running in place. “Star Trek Beyond” opens with Kirk, and Spock, each having a private existential meltdown: Kirk from the every-day-is-like-the-last-day routine of piloting through space, and Spock from the knowledge that he might want to ditch the Enterprise to become a Vulcan patriarch, now that Commander Spock has died — a nod to the late Leonard Nimoy, whom Quinto inspiringly echoes in the hint of warmth masked by his impish ultra-deadpan. You can rest assured that this team will become a team again, because that’s the message of the movie: that in space (or maybe anywhere), a crew of quirky oddballs beats a scaly megalomaniac every time. But that’s kind of a lesson that we already knew. “Star Trek Beyond” is a somewhat diverting place holder, but one hopes that the next “Star Trek” movie will have what it takes to boldly go where no “Star Trek” movie has gone before.

Film Review: ‘The Legend of Tarzan’

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:30:44 +0530

A talky and mostly turgid attempt by British director David Yates to build on the epic vision he brought to the final four Harry Potter movies via another beloved literary hero, “The Legend of Tarzan” is sequel, origin story, and racially sensitive revisionist history lesson all in one. What it isn’t is much fun for anyone who’s seen Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape man in any of his previous incarnations. While name recognition alone should snare a fair number of those who prefer their pulp heroes endowed with superpowers, between this and last year’s “Pan,” evidence suggests Warner Bros. ought to leave the live-action reboots to Disney.

For a film the scale of Yates’ “The Legend of Tarzan,” the visual effects are astonishingly subpar, obliging the creative team to distract us with such impressive topographical sights as the African savannah and Alexander Skarsgård’s abs. The latter selling point doesn’t appear until nearly midway through the movie, until which point Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer’s script is concerned primarily with getting Tarzan back to Africa — a prospect his beloved Jane (a semi-empowered Margot Robbie) far prefers to days spent “hybridizing coconuts and playing ping pong.” While choppy, action-oriented flashbacks retrace the feral child’s formative years in the wild, it seems the one-time vine-swinger has grown up and re-gentrified in rainy old England, where he has traded his loincloth for a dapper pair of pants and assumed his identity as John Clayton III, fifth earl of Greystoke and member of the House of Lords.

Covering his protagonist in scars (a superficial gesture toward realism), Yates has attempted to give us a more psychologically complex Tarzan — which is to say, he serves up a version of the character that shamelessly emulates the “why so serious” tone of Christopher Nolan’s brooding Batman movies. Skarsgård plays Clayton as a pampered rich kid haunted by his parents’ deaths who feels compelled to protect others. The main difference is the fact that everybody knows his secret identity, which makes it rather easy for the film’s villain, Capt. Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz, in yet another of his suave sociopath roles, just a few degrees removed from the well-mannered Nazi officer he played in “Inglourious Basterds”) to invent a pretext that will lure Tarzan to the Congo, where Rom plans to deliver him to vengeful tribal chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou) in exchange for the sought-after diamonds of Opar.

Inadvertently helping to pull off Rom’s plan is another Tarantino regular, Samuel L. Jackson, who may as well be riffing on his score-settling “The Hateful Eight” character. Jackson plays George Washington Williams, a veteran of the American Civil War (and a real historical figure) who suspects that Belgian king Leopold II may be enslaving — or at least condoning the enslavement of — the natives of his colony in the Congo. Having fought to help end slavery in the United States, Williams has now set out to stanch the practice at its source, enlisting Tarzan (who, frankly, seems more interested in the fate of the gorilla family that raised him) to restore some sense of balance to the region.

Williams makes an intriguing addition to the formula, as does the decision to peg this particular Tarzan adventure to the Congo, which isn’t necessarily the backdrop Burroughs had in mind. (Situating it there does allow the film to make a more impactful commentary on Europe’s controversial relationship with the Dark Continent.) To the extent that white men have exploited Africa for more than two centuries, Tarzan comes to represent the extension — a hero who identifies with the natives and stands up to the corrupt white men who refuse to respect their lives, liberty, or potential claim to their own natural resources.

The film establishes Rom’s villainy early on via a scene of disturbingly cold-blooded genocide, as the Belgian officer gives the go-ahead for his Force Publique soldiers to gun down locals armed only with spears (although, like Tarzan, Yates seems more interested in the fate of the gorilla family later in the film). The historical figure on whom Rom is based was notoriously cruel to African natives — it was he who inspired the character of Col. Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness.” Dressed in white linen and armed with only a deadly rosary made from Madagascar spider silk, Rom gets the fate Hollywood feels he deserves, which includes a homophobic barb from Jane that flies right over the character’s head (“Sounds like you and your priest were really close”).

The role of Tarzan is unique among Western heroes in that he requires virtually no acting ability (as bodybuilder Miles O’Keeffe and Calvin Klein model Travis Fimmel both demonstrated). And yet, with each subsequent screen appearance, the bar is raised on how perfect audiences expect the character’s wildly unnatural physique to be. In that respect, Skarsgård makes a fine choice for the role, looking more than ever like someone’s fantasy PhotoShop rendering of father Stellan’s head grafted onto an impossibly shredded torso — which isn’t so far removed from the process the visual effects team used to meld his face onto an all-CG body during scenes when Tarzan swings through the trees at top speed.

To the extent that modern audiences accept the character as a sort of proto-superhero, Tarzan’s “powers” rank way down there with those of Aquaman: He’s super-strong, agile, and can speak to animals, having mastered the mating calls of nearly every African species. Whenever Tarzan shares the screen with animals, however, the critters look appallingly digital — with human actors not even bothering to look in the right direction much of the time (consider the scene when Mbonga’s men are surrounded by gorillas, reacting as if to invisible ghosts). It’s a glaring problem, given all the attention Yates poured into crafting a believable context for what amounts to a glorified B movie. As a brand, Burroughs’ hero has always been schlocky, and no amount of psychological depth or physical perfection can render him otherwise — especially if the filmmakers can’t swing a convincing interaction between Tarzan and his animal allies. That dynamic — along with his full-throated yodel — has always been Tarzan’s trademark, but in this relatively lifeless incarnation, it simply doesn’t register.

-Variety

Annecy: ‘Ice Age: Collision Course’ – New Worlds, New Characters, New Colors

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:21:23 +0530

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ANNECY — If the nine final-footage sequences sneak peeked at France’s Annecy Animation Fest on June 14 are anything to go by, in “Ice Age: Collision Course” franchise partners Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox will continue to explore family dynamics. Father Manny’s faces empty nest crisis.

But this fifth time round, Blue Sky and Fox have made a sustained effort at franchise freshness, exploring new worlds, new characters and a different palette. And Scrat, an illustrious catalyst of continental cataclysm in the past, is now allowed a more than cameo role as he unwittingly hurls waves of cosmic catastrophe at the world.

Whether all this pays off, or rather how much this will pay off, will be even in a matter of only days when “Collision Course” world premieres on June 19 at the Sydney Film Festival. Certainly, the 20 minutes-or-so total excerpts of “Ice Age: Collision Course” drew hearty applause from a largely student audience at Annecy. The box office numbers of the third and fourth iterations of “Ice Age,” plus the franchise overhaul in “Collision Course” suggests the franchise is not done yet.

The Annecy presentation, showcasing a total of near-20 minutes of never-seen fully-lit footage, captured well the drive at the heart of “Ice Age” to deliver the welcomingly familiar, while being welcomingly different. Introduced by Lori Forte, producer of all the “Ice Age” movies, and MikeThurmeier, co-director of 2012’s “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” the first sequence screened at Annecy is already known from movie trailers, picking up on a passing detail in the first “Ice Age,” in which Manny, Sid and Diego stroll through an Ice Museum, and the camera pulls back to reveal a frozen spaceship.

“It was very funny. We loved the idea and always thought there was a story here, so it laid the stage for ‘Ice Age: Collision Course,’” Forte said.

Scrat, the sabre-toothed squirrel-rat, once more in epic pursuit of his acorn, unwittingly re-discovers the ship, unleashes it into space with him and the acorn on board, creates the solar system as it is now today and, still going nuts about his nut, inadvertently sends an asteroid torching towards earth.

Directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, 2002’s original “Ice Age” depicted the creation of an unlikely family: Woolly mammoth Manny, sloth Sid and Diego, a sabre-tooth tiger.

“The heart of all our movies is family-value themes, watching a family grow and change,” said Forte.

Not that obnoxious Sid seems to have much chance of growing his own family-tree. In one early sequence, he proposes to his girlfriend – he’s thought out everything, even down to their joint burial plot – and is rotundly dumped. A third sequence introduces a new character: Julian, Peaches’ fiancé, a goofy, loveable and very woolly mammoth, who is everything control-freak Manny is not.

Attempting to avert the asteroid, the herd travels to Geotopia, guided by “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur’s” weasel Buck (Simon Pegg), reintroduced to the saga. The crash site of the asteroid which destroyed the dinosaurs harbours a civilisation which turns “Ice Age’s” colour scheme on its head.

“In traditional ‘Ige Age’ films, everything was blue, white and earth-coloured. The cosmos in ‘Collision Course’ is all purples and pinks, and Geotopia looks like a geode, a beautiful new environment with the colors of the rainbow,” Forte enthused.

In Geotopia, the herd meets Brooke (Jessie J), a fetching sloth, who takes an instant shine to Sid, and introduces the gang to Shangri Llama (Jesse Tyler-Ferguson), Geotopia’s so-cool spiritual leader.

In maybe the most hilarious scene seen Tuesday – up there with Sid’s bathetic marriage proposal – Scrat hits a gravity button in the spaceship and collapses on the spaceship floor, like a pile of cement.

“Ice Age: Collision Course: is about Sid, impossible as it might seem, finally finding true love. Its emotional core. however, is its theme of parents having to know how to let go,” Forte said.

“Everybody loves Scrat. Comedically, he defines ‘Ice Age’ in a lot of ways. But Manny is the heart of ‘Ice Age’ from the first film when we meet him and he lost his family,” Thurmeier added.

“Every film is a development of Manny’s life. In the first, he meets his friends and finds love; in the second, he has a daughter; in the fourth she’s just growing up, and here’s she about to move on. Manny really defines the central story.”

“Will there be another ‘Ice Age’?” an audience member asked at Annecy.

“We’ll wait and see if audiences wants more and, if they do, I have an idea,” said Forte.

She’ll almost certainly have to use it.

-Variety

Box Office: ‘Finding Dory’ Swims Past $300 Million in U.S. at Record Pace

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:05:44 +0530

“Finding Dory” swam past the $300 million mark at the domestic box office in record time. Disney-Pixar’s sequel hit the milestone in 12 days — the fastest animated film to do so.

The previous record for topping $300 million was 18 days, held by “Toy Story 3” and “Shrek 2.” It’s the 11th animated pic to reach that mark and the seventh from Disney.

“Finding Dory,” which stars Ellen DeGeneres as the forgetful fish, took in $14.7 million on Tuesday to lift its domestic total to $311.2 million. Disney has dominated the box office this year with “Captain America: Civil War” hauling $404 million, “The Jungle Book” earning $358 million and “Zootopia” taking in $334 million.

“Finding Dory” has collected $433 million worldwide with $121.8 million internationally. It opens in Brazil and the Netherlands this weekend, with the U.K., Korea, Mexico, Japan, Italy and Germany still to come.

“Finding Dory” dominated the U.S. box office in its second weekend with $73 million — the eighth-highest grossing second frame ever and nearly double the debut of “Independence Day: Resurgence.” It’s likely to win again in the upcoming Fourth of July session, despite the launches of “The BFG,” “The Legend of Tarzan” and “The Purge: Election Year.”

The original “Finding Nemo” grossed $300 million domestically and $556 million internationally in 2003.

-Variety

‘Captain America: Civil War’ hits $200M at the box office before U.S. premiere

Tue, 03 May 2016 08:03:30 +0530

By the time Captain America: Civil War premieres in the U.S. on May 6th, the gigantic Marvel-Disney blockbuster will have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales internationally. In the first five days since launching in Europe and other markets, Civil War already reached the $200 million mark, promising to give Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Deadpool and Batman v. Superman a run for the money.

Civil War premiered in 37 international markets on Wednesday, including France, Korea, and many others. The film only opened in 63% of the global marketplace, CNN Money reports, meaning that sales are only going to go up from here. In addition to the U.S., Civil War is also supposed to launch soon in China – the two countries are the biggest markets in the world.

At $200.2 million in ticket sales in the first five days, the movie is just 5% behind the opening of last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, according to Disney. The second Avengers movie made $1.4 billion at the box office worldwide.

Some analysts see the movie opening at $200 million in North America later this week, which is $25 million more than Disney’s projections for the launch weekend. According to some analysts, Civil War may even compete for the second-biggest U.S. film opening of all time. The title is held by Jurassic World, which netted $208.8 million at the box office in the first weekend.

Critics praised the movie after early screenings, which might give Civil War a significant boost. After all, in spite of heavy criticism, Batman v. Superman topped $855 million worldwide at the box office.

Theri's success raises hopes for a sequel

Tue, 03 May 2016 07:51:09 +0530

Ilayathalapathy Vijay's 'Theri', directed by Atlee and produced by S Thanu, is continuing to do well at the Chennai box office. Completing its third weekend, the film reportedly is running in all centres with good collections.

According to reports, the film, which has Amy Jackson and Samantha as the female leads, has managed to collect Rs 66.97 crore during its 12-day run in Tamil Nadu, Rs 33.85 crore in the other states of India and Rs 42.70 crore in the overseas market. The best part of this success story is that Theri has done fantastic collections overseas. It even broke into the Top 10 in the UK box office chart (ranked at No 8) during the first week of its release.

With the huge success of the film, there are reports doing the rounds that Atlee and VIjay will be joining hands once again for 'Theri 2'. Director Atlee is reported to have already written a script for the sequel, too. Even before the film's release, a source in the film's unit had told us that Theri will definitely have a sequel. "The second part will revolve around actor Vijay and his relationship with his daughter, who will, to keep the continuity alive, be more grown up. Vijay's real-life daughter, Divya, will play his reel-life daughter in the sequel, too," our source had said.

'Baaghi' was one of the most downloaded movies of 2016 last week

Tue, 03 May 2016 07:38:37 +0530

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'The Jungle Book' rules the box office again

Tue, 03 May 2016 07:23:39 +0530

Disney's "The Jungle Book" trounced a handful of underperforming new releases to rule the box office for a third consecutive week, while next week's certain champ, "Captain America: Civil War," began setting records overseas.

Jon Favreau's live-action Rudyard Kipling adaptation earned $42.4 million in its third week at North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday. One of the year's biggest hits, "The Jungle Book" has now totaled $684.8 million globally.

The weekend's debuts withered under the stampede of "The Jungle Book."

Keegen-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's feline action-comedy "Keanu" opened with a modest $9.4 million. That was a whisker behind "The Huntsman: Winter's War," which limped its way to $9.4 million in its second disappointing week of release.

Warner Bros.' R-rated "Keanu," from the former Comedy Central stars of "Key and Peele," cost only about $15 million to make. In it, they play Los Angeles cousins who are led into a criminal underworld in their search for a lost cat.

Garry Marshall's latest holiday-themed romantic comedy, "Mother's Day," bowed with a weak $8.3 million despite the presence of stars Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts. Though Marshall's "Valentine's Day" opened with $56.2 million in 2010, audiences have since been less enthusiastic for his poorly reviewed Hallmark card ensembles. "Mother's Day," released by Open Road, even trails the $13 million opening of 2011's "New Year's Eve."

The video-game adaption "Ratchet & Clank," from Focus Features, made even less of a dent with an estimated $4.8 million.

With "Captain America: Civil War" opening next weekend in North America, the box office was largely in a holding pattern, waiting for Marvel to effectively launch the summer movie season. "Civil War" gave a preview of its might in 37 international territories over the weekend, taking in an estimated $200.2 million. That includes record openings in Mexico, Brazil and the Philippines for the film some expect to be the year's biggest hit.

Once it lands, Disney will have accounted for three of the top five movies of the year, along with "The Jungle Book" and "Zootopia."

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to comScore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. "The Jungle Book," $42.4 million ($57.1 million international).

2. "The Huntsman: Winter's War," $9.4 million.

3. "Keanu," $9.4 million.

4. "Mother's Day," $8.3 million ($2.1 million international).

5. "Barber Shop: The Next Cut," $6.1 million.

6. "Zootopia," $5 million ($8.3 million international).

7. "Ratchet & Clank," $4.8 million.

8. "The Boss," $4.2 million.

9. "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," $3.8 million ($2.8 million international).

10. "Criminal," $1.3 million.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and Canada), according to comScore:

1. "Captain America: Civil War," $200.2 million.

2. "The Jungle Book," $57.1 million.

3. "Finding Mr. Right," $51 million.

4. "Zootopia," $8.3 million.

5. "MBA Partners," $7.5 million.

6. "The Huntsman: Winter's War," $7.4 million.

7. "Phantom of the Theater," $7 million.

8. "Kung Fu Panda 3," $3.1 million.

9. "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," $2.8 million.

10. "Xuan Zang," $2.4 million.

Historic MOU signing between EAP films & Village cinemas

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 06:00:37 +0530

A new era in the Sri Lankan Cinematic industry! Village Cinemas and EAP Films signup to revolutionize and revamp the local cinematic industry and to provide the ultimate cinematic experience.

Village Roadshow of Australia and EAP Group of Sri Lanka signed up an MOU through which Village Cinemas and EAP Films and Theatres Ltd will jointly look at opportunities to develop modern cinema multiplexes in Sri Lanka.

Under this MOU both the companies are hoping to set up a JV in Sri Lanka, taking advantage of the Sri Lankan Governments incentives offered for multiplex cinemas.

It is envisaged that the Sri Lankan public will be benefitted by world class cinema offerings in both content and facilities.

Village is a world leader in the cinema industry with some of the best cine multiplexes on offer and is part of the Village Roadshow Group which also has interests in theme parks, film distribution and film production. EAP is a leader in the Sri Lankan film industry in Production, Distribution, Exhibition and Importation of films.

As part of this MOU, Village Roadshow and EAP Group , also agree to explore other opportunities in Sri Lanka such as Theme Parks, Satellite Pay TV, Property, Digital Multimedia Advertising and other Cinema related value added revenue streams.

The arrangements were negotiated by Clark Kirby, COO of Village Roadshow Group, Kirk Edwards CEO of Village Cinemas, Mano Tittawella, Chairman/MD of EAP Group, Ajith Amarasekera, Director/ CEO of Galaxy Landmarks, the EAP Group’s Property Development arm and Kasun Jayawardena, COO of EAP Films and Theatres in Melbourne, Australia recently.

‘Minions’ Masters $1B Global Box Office; Universal Sets Yet Another Industry Record

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 12:18:46 +0530

With Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment’s Minions having reached $990.2M globally last weekend, this milestone was to be expected. The little yellow fellows have now crossed $1B worldwide, with $682M coming from international and $321.9M in North America. This makes the Kyle Balda/Pierre Coffin-helmed pic the third-highest-grossing animated film of all time. Oh, and it sets another industry record for Universal: It is the first time any studio has had three films cross $1B at the worldwide box office in a single year. The Despicable Me spinoff joins Furious 7 and Jurassic World in that rarefied air.

Minions is Illumination’s highest-grossing film ever and the biggest animated film of 2015 at the worldwide box office. It takes that company, founded by Chris Meledandri and featuring a creative team that comes from 29 nationalities, to more than $3B worldwide for its five releases: Despicable Me, Hop, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, Despicable Me 2 and Minions. Despicable Me 2 just missed the $1B mark in 2013 with about $971M.

That film counted China is its grosses and Minions has yet to bow in the Middle Kingdom meaning further coin is afoot. It heads there on September 13. Italy released today and Turkey and Greece are still to go next month.