Standing, from left: Bradley Cooper as Phil, Zach Galifianakis as Alan and Ed Helms as Stu, with Aroon Seeboonruang, seated on a wheelchair, as Monk in The Hangover Part II
If the U.S. economy had leaped from its worst five-month stretch in recent history to a record-breaking surge, Barack Obama could proudly announce, "The Great Recession is over." The country's finances have seen no such dramatic upturn, but in the movie business they're singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Hollywood hills are alive with the sound of money, and on this holiday weekend the cash registers were caroling with the top Memorial Day frame ever. Moviegoers spent about $280 million at the North American box office over the four-day span — 80% of it on just three movies: The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
Rolling over the competition like a mighty river of, well, puke, Hang II staggered blithely to $86 million for in the usual Friday-to-Sunday weekend, with another $31.6 million for Thursday (including Wednesday midnight shows) and maybe another $20 million Monday, according to studio estimates. The whopping total: $137.4 million, or more than twice the $68 million earned by the weekend's other big opener, Panda 2. The DreamWorks Animation sequel reunited Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and the rest of the voice team from the 2008 martial-arts comedy, but couldn't quite measure up to the original's five-day opening take. (In fact, it's just a smidge above what the studio's Shrek Forever After earned in its second week on this same holiday last year.)
[TUESDAY EVENING UPDATE: The accountants at Warner Bros. may have sampled some of the Hangover guys' Mai Thais: they overestimated its weekend gross by $2.4 million. As this evening's final figures show, the movie earned $103.4 million for the four-day weekend, $135 million in the first five days. DreamWorks highballed Kung Fu Panda 2's take by about $1.4 million, giving the animated feature respective finishes of $60.9 million and $66.7 million. All other numbers were close to the Monday estimates.]
Meanwhile, Pirates 4 steamrollered the critics' antipathy by filching another $50 million this weekend for a domestic gross of $164 million and a worldwide swag of $634.8 million, landing it in the all-time top 50 box-office winners after only 10 days. (Second on the worldwide list for 2011 films: the Vin Diesel Carmageddon epic Fast Five, at $532 million.) The Marvel fantasy farrago Thor has also flexed at the plexes, earning $162.4 million in North America and more than $400 million on earth. Smaller but no less impressive was the take of Kristen Wiig's Bridesmaids, a girls-gone-wild version of The Hangover's marital-angst premise. Dropping only a petite 21% from last weekend's gross, Bridesmaids is nearing $100 million and has settled in for a long, profitable run.
So the past five weeks have produced four blockbuster-style monsters, plus a sleeper princess. Gone are the sluggish grosses of early 2011, when "hits" like the animated features Rango and Rio and the Adam Sandler comedy Just Go with It took three to six weekends to crawl up to the $100 million mark. Thor reached that number in a mere nine days, Fast Five in six, Pirates 4 in five and Hang II in four. Suddenly, after a prolonged Dark Age, it's a Golden May for movie grosses.
Even in the nanoland of indie movies, the top auteur names are attracting crowds. Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's time-tripping romantic comedy starring Owen Wilson, finished seventh this week — surely the highest placing for an Allen film in, I'll say, decades — though playing in only 58 theaters. (Its $3.5 million gross after 10 days is already more than his previous film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, earned in its full run.) And Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, fresh from its Palme d'Or win at the Cannes Film Festival last week, has taken in nearly $500,000 in four days at, count 'em, four theaters. It might as well be a Brad Pitt movie — which it also is.
The big noise, though, was the gigantic belch from Hang II. The movie's critical consensus has been tepid, with a failing 35 score from the reviewers' aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes (the original film pulled a healthy 79). Most scribes condemned it as not so much a sequel, or even a remake, but as a corrupt rerun — the same movie in an exotic setting, transporting the core team to Thailand as Sex in the City 2 had to Abu Dhabi. Kevin Carr, on the 7(M) Pictures blog, channeled the spirit of the Hangover dudes by writing, "You could literally smash yourself in the face with a frying pan, stumble into this movie and mistake it for the original ... almost."
Apparently, that's exactly what 15 million or so cinephiles were eager to do. They gave Hang II a generous A-minus in CinemaScore's survey of exiting filmgoers. And like the other hits of the past month, the picture lured back the young male audiences that had boycotted movie houses earlier this year: the majority of its patrons were under 25.
The ceiling-cracking force of that five-day, $137.4 million figure sent analysts scurrying to the archives. Best comedy opening ever? For sure, it creamed the previous top laff fests, Bruce Almighty and Sex and the City. How about best opening for an R-rated movie? Not quite. The Matrix Reloaded, the avidly awaited (then much derided) sequel to the Wachowski brothers' 1999 hit, grossed $144.4 million in its Thursday-to-Monday frame in mid-May 2003, with no holiday boost. The following February, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ opened on Ash Wednesday and in its first five days amassed $125.2 million, which would be about $164 million today. Still, it's not bad to finish behind just Neo and possibly Jesus.
Memorial Day weekends — like virtually all weekends in Hollywood's blockbuster summer season — are usually dominated by big action films. But Hang II proved it had the muscle to battle the big boys. It swamped the opening weekend totals of 2009's Night at the Museum sequel and 2010's Shrek Forever After. True, the movie's Thursday-to-Monday take is below the $153 million that the third Pirates of the Caribbean episode swiped in 2007 and the $152 million unearthed by the fourth Indiana Jones epic in 2008. In real dollars, Hang II also trails two films that had only four-day Memorial Day weekends: 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand (its $122.8 million would be $151.4 million today) and 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park (whose $92.7 million gross is $165.5 million in today's dollars). But that is only to say that Hang II could hang in there with the debuts of sequels to Spielberg smashes and superhero hits — and Johnny Depp's roguish smile.
No telling when audiences will start getting a headache, not a high, from the Hangover movies. But the sensational box-office start of this episode guarantees at least another sequel. And after Hang III, the series could replicate itself forever. Or at least until Hang 10.
Here are the Monday estimates of the top-grossing pictures in North American theaters over the four-day weekend, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. The Hangover Part II, $105.8 million, first weekend; $137.4 million, first five days
2. Kung Fu Panda 2, $62.2 million, first weekend; $68 million, first five days
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, $50.4 million; $164 million, second week
4. Bridesmaids, $21 million; $89.6 million, third week
5. Thor, $12 million; $162.4 million, fourth week
6. Fast Five, $8.2 million; $197.6 million, fifth week
7. Midnight in Paris, $2.6 million; $3.5 million, second week
8. Rio, $2.4 million; $135.4 million, seventh week
9. Jumping the Broom, $2.35 million; $34.6 million, fourth week
10. Something Borrowed, $2.32 million; $35.2 million, fourth week