Illumination Entertainment, which scored its biggest hit on this weekend a year ago with the $115 million debut of Minions , hit the jackpot again as The Secret Life of Pets bowed well above expectations with $103.2 million.

After a slumping five-month period at the beginning of 2016 in which comics and graphic novel sales to comic stores went down over 5%.

This week’s home entertainment releases won’t overshadow the fireworks, but there are some items of interest including Stephen Chow’s wild Hong Kong fantasy/comedy The Mermaid , a visually stunning Brazilian animated feature, the latest season of the marvelously Machiavellian political drama House of Cards , reasonably-priced collections of The Real Ghostbusters , and a bevy of interesting anime offerings led by the only Studio Ghibli film that has never been released here before and the steampunk sci-fi epic The Empire of Corpses.

Here's a preview of Brandon Sanderson's White Sand Vol. 1 HC , published by Dynamite Entertainment.

This week’s home entertainment offerings include an often brilliant science fiction road movie that will remind many of John Carpenter’s Starman, the sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding , the latest comedy from Sacha Baron Cohen, a chance to get the first season of the revived Doctor Who on Blu-ray, the second half of the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III, and for the first time ever here in North America, the complete, uncut 1976 super robot anime Gaiking .

Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez are returning to their Eisner Award-winning comic book series Locke & Key for a one-shot comic that is due from IDW in December of 2016.

These are estimates of the sales on graphic novels by Diamond U.S. to comic specialty stores during May 2016.

This week’s home entertainment releases include a superior genre-blending thriller, an excellent comic book-based science fiction TV series, plus lower-priced editions of the original Star Trek and the Next Gen series, and one of the most faithful screen adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan .

NBM has several interesting upcoming releases planned for Fall and Winter.

The first of 2016’s billion dollar movies to come out on disc, a biting Hollywood satire that deserves a better fate than it enjoyed at the box office, another savage and surreal example of grandparenting gone bad, the first collection of The Shannara Chronicles , a high-def edition of the original Roots miniseries, and a superb slate of anime releases.