Ice Age 3 made what?

Normally we save our facts and figures stories for the weekend box office roundup, but I saw this and just had to bring it up. For some inexplicable reason, ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS has become some sort of tidal wave hit overseas, and recently eclipsed FINDING NEMO as the top grossing animated feature around the world. NEMO had $524.9 million, ICE AGE just passed $551.4 million.

ICE AGE didn’t even win its opening weekend box office here, as it was surpassed by REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, but with its massive overseas haul, the film’s grand total sits at $731.5 million worldwide, not too short of TRANSFORMERS 2’s $812.7 million. For another point of reference, the animated movie that we all know was a smash hit here, UP, has “only” made $340.5 million worldwide, with a paltry $54 million of that coming from overseas.

So all of this begs the question, “What the hell?” Not to say that ICE AGE 3 was a bad movie, but what exactly is it about it that people outside the U.S. like 10x more than UP? Maybe it has something to do with how the film was distributed in foreign markets (if so, someone at Disney really dropped the ball), or maybe it’s just because people like talking dinosaurs and not so much hunched over old men. Whatever the case, this means that we’re seeing at least two more sequels to this thing.