A Mexican animated film about a plucky rooster facing off against a cruel rancher was a stealth winner at an otherwise lackluster U.S. Labor Day Weekend box office.

Un Gallo Con Muchos Huevos, ("A Rooster With Many Eggs,") racked up an impressive $4.4 million over the four-day holiday across a mere 395 screens, a fraction of the number of locations reserved for major summer releases like Straight Outta Compton or Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

The project is the creation of the Mexican film production company Huevocartoon, and was made exclusively in Mexico, costing $5 million and taking four years to finish.

Its success follows a pattern established by its U.S. distributor Pantelion Films, which has previously used Labor Day as a launching pad for hits like last year's Cantinflas, a biopic about the Mexican comedian, and 2013's Instructions Not Included, which remains the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in history.

"It's a big family weekend for Hispanics and they tend to go to the movies as a family," said Paul Presburger, Pantelion's CEO. "It's known as a weekend where major studios don't release many new pictures, so where they're zigging, we're zagging."

The film has also done well in Mexico, where it opened in August and generated $6 million in ticket sales over two weeks.

Un Gallo Con Muchos Huevos is the third in a farm trilogy that began in 2006 with Una pelicula de huevos (A Film About Eggs) followed in 2009 by Otra pelicula de huevos y un pollo (Another Film About Eggs and a Chicken) although neither of these two works ever made it to U.S. movie screens.

"Un gallo con muchos huevos" will be shown in Spanish with English subtitles for the first two weeks of its US run, but from then on it will be fully dubbed in English.