Mckenna Grace’s Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie hit theaters on August 14, 2026, and immediately gave the franchise its strongest opening in years, both at the box office and with the people actually buying tickets. Grace returns as the voice of Skye, the fearless flying Cockapoo she has now played across two feature films, following the action-packed trailer TDN covered for Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie back in 2023, and building on the first teaser for this new installment that TDN broke back in March.
Domestically, Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie opened to an estimated 20.5 million dollars across 3,545 theaters, which tracking has called the biggest single opening day in the franchise’s history, outpacing The Mighty Movie by roughly 6.8 million dollars on day one alone. Internationally the film performed even better, adding another 48.5 million dollars overseas for a 69 million dollar worldwide debut. The film narrowly missed third place on the North American chart, finishing about half a million dollars behind The End of Oak Street, the Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor dinosaur thriller that also opened August 14. Both movies landed behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, but industry watchers have pointed out that the two very different dinosaur movies sharing an opening weekend did not appear to cut into each other’s audiences at all.
What has really driven headlines since the weekend, though, is how the movie is playing with the people who actually saw it. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie earned an A CinemaScore from opening night crowds, and its Rotten Tomatoes numbers back that up. Critics have it at 81 percent, already the best critical score of any Paw Patrol film to date, but the bigger story is the audience score, which sits at a stunning 95 percent, up from the 93 percent The Mighty Movie earned in 2023. Multiple outlets have specifically called out how rare it is for a family franchise entry to land that well with actual audiences and not just critics.
Grace has been doing press for the film all month, and in recent interviews she has framed Paw Patrol less as a kids’ movie and more as a shared experience for the whole family. She has talked about parents, grandparents and siblings all walking into the same theater and walking out having shared something together, tracing that idea back to her own memories of going to the movies with her father as a kid, saying the theater itself became the memory, and who she was with became the memory too. It is the kind of comment that lines up with what TDN has tracked with this franchise since Grace was first announced as part of the voice cast back in January 2023, through the Bark To The Beat single she recorded with Blackbear for The Mighty Movie soundtrack. Three years and two movies later, the audience score suggests families are still showing up, and now they are showing up in bigger numbers than ever.
Mckenna Grace is back as Skye in the @pawpatrol's greatest big-screen adventure! 💗 🐾 #PAWPatrolMovie soars into theatres everywhere tomorrow. Get your tickets now! pic.twitter.com/CVG6l2FbNB
— PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie (@PAWPatrolMovie) August 13, 2026
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