I’m just back from my second viewing of The Peanuts Movie (the kids wanted to see it), this time in 2-D… and I was right, it works just fine in 2-D. And I see that the weekend box office estimates are up. Now, these are a silly thing, they release these on Sunday morning, which means that they feel that it’s so important to post some sort of total today that they can’t wait for the weekend to actually be over. But let’s look at the silly number: they are guessing that the film will end the weekend with a gross of $45 million dollars. That’s pretty good, especially for a G-rated movie. How good? It’s the second highest opening weekend gross ever for a G-rated film. In fact, if it turns out to be the slightest underestimate, if they’re rounding down, if the real total ends up being a fraction of .1% of that, if they earn just $12,999 more than that says, it will be the biggest non-Pixar G film opening ever. Or to look at it another way: $45 million is more than last weekend’s top five films combined.

One detail I caught on the second view: we actually get a name for the Little Red-Haired Girl. If you look closely at the sheet of test results, you’ll see (among other Peanuts names; 5 is on there) an entry for “Heather Wold” – “Heather” being the name given to a red-haired girl (we can discuss whether it’s The LR-HG) in It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, “Wold” being the married last name of Donna Mae Johnson, the object of Schulz’s affection who was the real-life inspiration for the character.

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