NEW YORK — Moviegoers didn’t have much to go on with the mysterious “10 Cloverfield Lane,” but the words “Cloverfield” and “J.J. Abrams” were enough.

The Abrams-produced monster movie, a so-called “spiritual successor” to 2008’s found-footage hit “Cloverfield,” opened with a better-than-expected $25.2 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That was good enough for second place to the Disney animated hit “Zootopia,” which stayed on top with $50 million in its second week, a slide of only 33 percent from its opening weekend.

The weekend’s biggest disappointment, though, was Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Brothers Grimsby,” which flopped with a mere $3.2 million. It’s a career low box-office debut for the shape-shifting British comedian.

Whereas Cohen’s most popular characters – Borat and Ali G – were deployed largely to satirize America, moviegoers showed less enthusiasm for the British parody of “Brothers Grimsby,” a poorly reviewed R-rated, U.K.-set spy comedy.

With the multiplexes stuffed with R-rated offerings (“Deadpool,” “London Has Fallen,” “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”), the acclaimed “Zootopia” has had family audiences all to itself. The film, which imagines a metropolis inhabited by animals, will have little competition before “The Jungle Book” arrives in mid-April.

– From news service reports


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