Ted 2 Fails to Bear Fruit at Domestic Box Office

Seth MacFarlane’s raunchy R-rated Ted 2 could have used some fuzzy-wuzziness at the North American box office this weekend.

The $68 million comedy, reuniting MacFarlane with Mark Wahlberg, eked out a third-place finish, grossing a disappointing $32.9 million. That’s 39 percent behind the $54 million launch of Ted in summer 2012.

Granted, the first film didn’t face competition from two giant tentpoles, as Ted 2 did from Universal’s Jurassic World and Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, which continued to claim the top two spots.

Jurassic World, one of the biggest box-office sensations in history, grossed $54.2 million in its third outing to hit $500 million, becoming only the fifth film to earn $500 million or more domestically. The others are The Dark Knight ($534.9 million), The Avengers ($623.4 million),Titanic ($658.7 million) and Avatar ($760.5 million). To boot, it’s now the top-grossing film of 2015 to date after overtaking Avengers: Age of Ultron ($451.2 million).

The tentpole narrowly won the weekend in a close contest with Inside Out, which grossed a pleasing $52.2 million to push the animated film’s early domestic total to $184.9 million.

Ted 2, about the adventures of a raunchy bear and his sidekick (MacFarlane voices the bear) was tracking to open in the mid- to high-$40 million range, but bad reviews and a B+ CinemaScore are likely hurting it (the first earned an A-). Media Rights Capital produced and financed the movie, with Universal handling distribution duties.

The original Ted was a box-office sensation, grossing $549.4 million to become one of the top R-rated comedies of all time.

MacFarlane produced the live action/CG-animated sequel alongside Bluegrass Films’ Scott Stuber, Jason Clark and John Jacobs. The sequel adds Amanda Seyfried, John Slattery andMorgan Freeman, while New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady makes a cameo.

The weekend’s other new nationwide offering, the canine friendly Max, opened to $12.2 million to place No. 4.

From MGM, costing less than $20 million to make, follows the relationship between a dog who returns from service in Afghanistan traumatized by his handler’s death, and the dead Marine’s son, with whom the dog develops a relationship. The movie got an A CinemaScore.

Warner Bros. is releasing and marketing Max on behalf of MGM. Also this weekend, Warners released the documentary Batkid Begins in four theaters in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. The doc, about the young boy with cancer who galvanized the nationwide when his wish was to become “Batkid,” grossed $23,000 for a location average of $5,865.

This article originally appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

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