This past weekend, domestic box office receipts for Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo rose up another US$4.4 million, with totals now passing US$313 million. That makes Finding Nemo the highest-grossing animated feature film ever by about $200,000. The previous record has been held for almost a decade by another Disney feature — The Lion King .
It’s great news for Pixar Animation Studios, which also saw Finding Nemo open with the strongest weekend receipts ever for an animated movie — $70.6 million. The $313 mark also puts the movie in the number one spot for the year.
If you’re wondering what the Mac connections are, there are actually a few. The most obvious is the identity of Pixar’s CEO — Steve Jobs. But Pixar — long a bastion of high-powered graphics workstations and, more recently, Intel-based heavy iron — garnered headlines in June when the company indicated that it may bring its Renderman 3D graphics technology back to the Macintosh in the wake of Apple’s release of the Power Mac G5. Pixar President Ed Catmull also appears in the introduction video for the G5 on Apple’s Web site, where he calls Apple’s new pro desktop machine “the fastest desktop in the world.”
Finding Nemo tells the story of a clownfish whose son is kidnapped by a reef diver and taken to a fish tank in a dentist’s office. With the voices of Albert Brooks, Ellen Degeneres and other stars, the movie has been a runaway hit since its release more than two months ago.
Disney subsidiary Buena Vista Home Entertainment announced earlier this week plans to release a 2-disc Collector’s Edition DVD Set and VHS release of Finding Nemo this November. The $29.99 DVD set will feature widescreen and full screen versions of Finding Nemo, deleted scenes and documentary info, and much more.