The past six months have been pretty sluggish for comedies at the box office, with high-profile movies like This Is 40 and Guilt Trip faring worse than expected, but comedy's dry spell seems to be over. This weekend, the Jason Bateman-Melissa McCarthy vehicle Identity Thief topped the charts, earning $36.6 million despite mostly negative reviews from critics. Last weekend's #1 movie, Warm Bodies, a zombie rom-com, came in second with $11.5 million. Identity Thief and Warm Bodies are the first comedies to top the box office since Seth MacFarlane's Ted was #1 for a single weekend last summer. Please use the comments section to thank me for not giving this post one of those [...]
The Campaign opened this weekend, and it clocked a strong second place behind The Bourne Not-Matt-Damon with $27.44 million in receipts. That's not as big as many blockbuster comedy openings like The Hangover Part II, but it's pretty great for a summer that's seen almost no comedies succeed. It has a steep hill to climb to catch Ted, which is by far the biggest comedy of the summer with nearly $210 million (!!!) made so far, but it should at least beat The Dictator, which is currently the second biggest comedy of the summer with about $60 million made so far.
And its in line with the opening [...]
After over a decade of mixed reviews and lacking box office returns, Wes Anderson seems poised to have another breakout hit on his hands. Moonrise Kingdom, which is currently at a career-high 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, made $669,486 over Memorial Day Weekend on just four screens. The film ended up averaging $130,752 per theater over the weekend, beating the previous record average held by Dreamgirls. It's hard to guarantee this will mean large box office returns when the film opens wide in June but it sure is heartening. Since The Royal Tenebaums in 2001, Wes Anderson has struggled to build much momentum for his films. The Darjeeling Limited [...]
According to Deadline, Our Idiot Brother's weekend box office blew in at #6, a position for which it tied with Spy Kids 4D. What with 1,000 theaters closed up and down the East Coast, the entire weekend might turn out to be the worst moviegoing weekend in 2011 so far, though on the flip side no one got decapitated by an stop sign on their way to see Colombiana.
It's not completely clear, but I'm assuming The Hollywood Reporter's announcement that Bridesmaids is the highest grossing female comedy of all time means female-lead or female-focused comedy of all time. Female-centric? Either way, on Sunday Bridesmaids reached $152.9 million, surpassing Sex and the City's $152.6 million, despite having approximately the same number of diarrhea gags.
Universal heralds Bridesmaids as their biggest rom-com ever, as well as the seventh best romantic comedy of all time, calling into question how much actual on-screen romance a movie needs to fit into the "rom-com" category rather than "comedy original flavor." Says director Paul Feig, who is currently working on rumored [...]
