Here are the facts: the Adam Sandler gay-sham com I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry won the weekend box office derby, pulling in about $35 million to Harry Potter and The What Kind Of Magical Scrape Have These Spooky Kids Conjured Up Now?!?'s $32 million. $35 million is a significant opening take, and it would not have been possible to rack up if Sandler's base audience had been turned off by the pic's pro-gay tolerance theme. Not only was the gay marriage thing not a problem--it might have been a plus. Just look at the numbers: Adam Sandler fans are more likely to rush out opening weekend see their guy pretend to pretend to be gay, than watch him in a serious film about post-9/11 ennui...by a factor of seven.
And now, here's the spin: Jeff Wells, LAist and the New York Times think Mr. Potter's 58% weekend-to-weekend decline may have been the result of Harry Potter overload. LAist has the better quip: "My guess is that the release of Deathly Hallows cost Order of the Phoenix a second consecutive weekend crown (I still can't believe that Voldermort turned out to be Harry's father!)." I honestly can't tell if Nikki Finke is being sarcastic when she writes, "There'd been speculation whether the new Harry Potter book would cut into the franchise's movie ticket sales. Nah!" I can tell you that she definitely loses points for using the term "fivequel."
Meanwhile, Box Office Mojo couldn't really care less about gay marriage vs. boy wizardry--for these datamasters, it's all about Hairspray. Brandon Gray devotes the opening four paragraphs of a 7-graph writeup to the musical, which broke records for its genre. Gray notes that even adjusting for inflation, Hairspray's $28 million opening easily beat the record for the best musical opening weekend ever previously held by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And it's not just good news for song-and-dance lovers--New Line needed this hit. "It marks New Line's first $20 million-plus launch since Wedding Crashers two years ago and breaks the distributor's losing streak that had persisted since Final Destination 3 in February 2006."
More spin:
Transformers is still doing okay -- Comics2Film
A victory for homophobia? -- Lou Lemenick
...or one for Jessica Biel's butt? --Obsessed with Film
Originally posted on:
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