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Disney Has Won 9 Out of Last 10 Oscars For Best Animated Feature Disney triumphed in the Best Animated Feature Category at the Academy Awards – the studio’s ninth win in the last ten yearsWhich would you expect to win the Fourth of July weekend: the Disney-produced, Johnny Depp-starring revival of an iconic American hero or the sequel to a French-made, Steve Carell-starring animated movie about a lovable supervillain? Well, it looks like American audiences simply aren't interested in westerns, even the uber-expensive ones starring Captain Jack Sparrow with a bird on his head. 'Despicable Me 2' destroyed 'The Lone Ranger' over the holiday weekend. Like, totally wrecked it. Although the first 'Despicable Me' grossed a very impressive $251 million back in 2010, home video transformed it into a serious phenomenon, the kind of movie that never leaves the Blu-ray player in homes with young kids. A big opening was expected, but an $82 million weekend and a $142 million week is seriously impressive stuff.
The combination of the holiday and the general family-friendliness of the film (and the fact that more kids know Gru than the Lone Ranger) made it the biggest draw of the weekend. Unless something horrible happens, $300 million is a certainty. Heck, at the very least, it'll surpass the gross of the first film. What can we say? Kids love those minions. Meanwhile, not even the team that produced the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films could lead 'The Lone Ranger' to success, with the reinvention of the radio and TV icon opening to a sad $29 million weekend and $48 million week. Surely director Gore Verbsinksi and producer Jerry Bruckheimer thought they could do for the western what they already did for the pirate movie, but whatever magic they had before seems to have worn off. The handful of successful westerns in the past decade have skewed older, so simply going bigger and flashier wasn't going to win anyone over here. Kids still won't see a western and the people who made 'True Grit' a hit were probably turned off by how loud and obnoxious the whole thing looked.
To hammer home how bad the opening weekend of 'The Lone Ranger' really is, just look at 'The Heat,' which came in barely behind it in its second week with $25 million. The R-rated cop comedy has $86 million already and it doesn't look like it'll be slowing down anytime soon. In a few weeks, it'll out-gross 'The Hangover Part III.' Who saw that coming? Although 'The Lone Ranger' was the greatest victim of the success of 'Despicable Me 2,' Pixar's 'Monsters University' took a bit of a hit as its audience went elsewhere, leading to a weekend gross of $19 million. Still, with $216 million total, the animated prequel is already a hit and it's going to be just fine in the long run. In fifth place, 'World War Z' continued to perform steadily if not spectacularly, earning $18 million for a $158 million total. This isn't quite where the very expensive production needs to be, but it's doing okay, especially when you take international grosses into account. Right below it, 'White House Down' fell to sixth place with a $13 million weekend and a $50 million total.
Those are not good numbers. Meanwhile, 'Man of Steel' continued to perform well, with its $11 million weekend bringing it to $271 million. $300 million is certainly a possibility if the big July releases don't take the wind out of its sails. In any case, any lingering thoughts of 'Superman Returns' seem to have vanished. And then we come to the big surprise of the week. Although concert films have a lengthy track record of not doing particularly well in theaters, 'Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain' did a shockingly solid $17 million over the holiday week. We have no idea how long it'll hang around, but that's excellent. The top ten is rounded out with 'This is the End' and 'Now You See Me,' with the former so close to $100 million that it can taste it and the latter officially a member of the $100 million club. Next week sees the release of 'Pacific Rim' and 'Grown Ups 2.' That has no right to be a bloodbath, but it looks like it very well could be. FILE - This April 6, 1993 file photo shows Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in New York.
Kenneth McKoy of the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N.C., said Abdel-Rahman died Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017, after a long battle with diabetes and coronary artery disease. Abdel-Rahman was sentenced to life in prison after his 1995 conviction for his advisory role in a plot to blow up landmarks, including the United Nations, and several bridges and tunnels. FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2012 file photo, Egyptian protesters hold posters showing Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is imprisoned in the US, and call for his release outside a court in Cairo, Egypt. Abdel-Rahman died , Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017 after suffering from diabetes and coronary artery disease, said Kenneth McKoy at the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N. C. Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik convicted of plotting terror attacks in New York City in the decade before 9/11 and spiritual guide to a generation of Islamic militants, has died in a federal prison. Abdel-Rahman, who had diabetes and coronary artery disease, died Saturday at the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina, said its acting executive assistant, Kenneth McKoy.
The inmate spent seven years at the prison medical facility while serving a life sentence. "We are saddened by your departure, father," the cleric's daughter, Asmaa, tweeted in Arabic. Abdel-Rahman was a key spiritual leader for militants and became a symbol for radicals during his decades in U.S. prisons, where his captivity inspired plots, protests and calls for violence. The only person charged in the U.S. in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, had said he was training for a mission to fly a jet into the White House if the government refused to free Abdel-Rahman. Blind since infancy from diabetes, Abdel-Rahman was the leader of one of Egypt's most feared militant groups, the Gamaa Islamiya, or the "Islamic Group," which at its height led a campaign of violence aimed at toppling that country's onetime president, Hosni Mubarak. Abdel-Rahman fled Egypt to the U.S. in 1990 and began teaching in a New Jersey mosque. A circle of his followers were convicted in the Feb. 26, 1993, truck bombing of New York's World Trade Center that killed six people - eight years before al-Qaida's suicide plane hijackers brought the towers down.
Later in 1993, Abdel-Rahman was charged and later convicted as the leader of a group that conspired to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks, including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. Those attacks were never carried out, but U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, who later became attorney general, told the defendants at sentencing that if the plot hadn't been thwarted it would have: "brought about devastation on a scale that beggars the imagination, certainly on a scale unknown in this country since the Civil War." Abdel-Rahman was also convicted of plotting to assassinate Mubarak. Defense lawyer Ron Kuby, who once represented the sheik, said Abdel-Rahman's war was with a corrupt Egyptian government and he believes there was insufficient evidence to link him to the New York plots. "I'm not in any way defending his vision," Kuby said. "He was an Islamist, he believed in Sharia law and that's what he wanted to see in Egypt.
But he bore no malice toward the United States or the American people." Since his imprisonment, Abdel-Rahman's influence had been seen as more symbolic than that of a practical leader. His Gamaa Islamiya, which led a wave of violence in the 1990s against Western tourists, Egyptian police and Coptic Christians, was eventually crushed, and its leaders - jailed in Egypt - declared a truce. Abdel-Rahman's activities pre-dated Osama bin Laden's formation of al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But he was an influential figure in the generation of Islamic extremists that emerged from Egypt in recent decades. He shared an ideology with another prominent group at the time, Islamic Jihad, that rejected the governments of Egypt and other Arab countries as infidels that must be overthrown by force. Throughout his militant activities, however, Abdel-Rahman was faced by rejection by some fundamentalists, who argued that Islamic law forbids a blind man from being a commander. Born in the Egyptian Nile Delta village of al-Gamalia in 1938, Abdel-Rahman was blind by the age of 10 months.
Still, he said in his autobiography that he memorized Islam's holy book, the Quran, by age 11. He attended Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a center of Islamic scholarship and then began preaching as an imam in a mosque in the oasis of Fayyoum, an agricultural area just south of Cairo. He quickly ran into trouble as he turned toward a radical interpretation of Islam that holds that those who don't follow a strict version of Islamic Sharia law are infidels. After the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1970, he told followers not to pray for the soul of the leader of secular Arab nationalism because he was an infidel. That got him eight months in prison. After the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Islamic militants, Abdel-Rahman was jailed and accused of sanctioning the killing. He was later acquitted. He escaped several later scrapes with the courts - acquitted in 1984 of plotting to overthrow the government and in 1989 of sparking anti-government protests in Fayyoum.
In 1989, after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the death of British writer Salman Rushdie, Abdel-Rahman issued a similar fatwa ordering the death of Egyptian Nobel-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz for writings some Muslims considered blasphemous. Mahfouz, who died in late 2006, was stabbed in 1994 by a radical who said he was following Abdel-Rahman's edict. Before moving to the U.S., Abdel-Rahman travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he became a spiritual leader for the mujahedeen, then fighting Soviet troops with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. Even though Abdel-Rahman was on a list of suspected terrorists and thus banned from the U.S., he managed to enter the country in 1990 because of a bureaucratic blunder. He was given permanent residence status under the name Omar Ahmed Ali. Efforts to free him gained new strength when Islamist Mohammed Morsi was elected as Egypt's president and vowed to free the blind sheik in 2012. Before Morsi was ousted a year later, Abdel-Rahman's supporters staged a series of sit-in protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo demanding his release.
Since Morsi's ouster by the military in July 2013, Egyptian authorities have taken an uncompromising stand on Islamists, and hundreds have been killed in street clashes in 2013 and 2014 and thousands jailed. No information was immediately released on burial plans. Any possible effort to repatriate the body to Egypt and hold a funeral there would likely draw thousands of mourners, mostly Islamists, thus raising the specter of clashes with the police. Egypt has effectively banned street demonstrations since November 2013 and security officials said contacts were already underway with leaders of the revived Gamaa Islamiya to ensure Abdel-Rahman's burial and funeral are peacefully held. Abdel-Rahman had two wives and 13 children. One of his sons, Ahmed, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011 in Afghanistan, where he was fighting U.S. and NATO forces. Melley reported from Los Angeles and Keath reported from Cairo. Hamza Hendawi in Cairo and Julie Walker in New York contributed to this report.