Ninja Turtles Rule Box Office

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sliced off $65 million at the weekend box office, and the totally tubular ticket sales prompted the studio to announce plans today for a sequel set for June 3, 2016. Paramount Pictures' comic-book adaptation featuring Megan Fox alongside computer-generated renditions of the pizza-eating, sewer-dwelling superheroes lunged into first place in its debut weekend, according to studio estimates. "This is the third weekend in a row we've had a film overperform," an analyst says after the success of Guardians of the Galaxy.

A Paramount exec said the success of the Ninja Turtles reboot was mostly derived from a pair of distinctly different audiences: men who fondly remembered the 1980s and '90s franchise and youngsters familiar with a newer Nickelodeon animated TV series. "It's odd when you have 25- to 35-year-olds and then 7- to 12-year-olds really excited about the same film," she said. Guardians slid into second place in its second weekend with $41.5 million, bringing its total domestic haul to $175.9 million. The total worldwide box office for the cosmic romp stands at $313.2 million. Total box office sales for the past two weekends have beaten last year's, analysts tell the Wall Street Journal. (More Guardians of the Galaxy stories.)