After two movies about the villains turned heroes, the "Despicable Me" franchise has surrendered to the fact that minions are its main selling point by releasing "Minions," a full-length feature film featuring the former side-characters in the spotlight. As it turns out, this was a pretty great move for them money-wise.

"Minions" easily dominated this weekend's domestic box-office, based from data collected by Box Office Mojo, with an astounding $115.2 million in 4,301 theaters. This makes "Minions" the highest animated opening of the year, easily beating Pixar's "Inside Out," which recorded $90.4 million. It is also the second-highest animated opening of all time, beating out Disney-Pixar's 2010 trilogy-capper "Toy Story 3," which made $110.3 million, and putting it behind "Shrek the Third," which had a $121.6 million 2007 opening.

This performance at the box-office comes as a shock considering that just a few weeks ago, analysts predicted an $85 million opening for the film. The figure is closer to its predecessor "Despicable Me 2," which opened to $83.5 million two years ago. However, the aggressive marketing push from Universal and its corporate partners might have put it over the top.

Bloomberg reports that the studio has delivered almost $593 million in ads and promotions from its partner companies. This aggressive push from Amazon, Snapchat, and most distinctively, the merchandising deal with McDonald's Corp., which has brought Minions toy fever worldwide, has done everything it can to ensure that "Minions" are on people's minds.

It certainly has. "Minions" is likely to gross $1 billion at the global box-office, which would make it the fourth film of 2015 to do so after Universal's own "Fast and Furious 7" and "Jurassic World," along with Disney-Marvel's "Avengers: Age of Ultron." If analysts at Citi are to be believed, five films could gross at least $1 billion at the box-office this year, with "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" being expected to also reach the billion dollar mark.

It is definitely a landmark year for Universal. The studio, thanks to its string of box-office hits this year that include "MInions," "Fast and Furious 7," "Jurrasic World," and "50 Shades of Grey," has already grossed $3 billion at the global box office according to Variety, making it the fastest studio to gross $3 billion within a year.

Other notable films at the weekend box-office are second place "Jurassic World," which took a strong $18.1 million on its fifth week, the competing "Inside Out," which dropped by 43 percent on its fourth weekend to take $17.1 million, and "Terminator Genisys," which dropped by almost 50 percent for a disappointing $13.7M weekend gross on its second weekend.