Box Office Prophecy: Kristen Wiig's Legs
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 3:00PM 
I've been in Boston for my girlfriend's birthday. Yesterday on the last day of the weekend birthday-ing, our group filed into a very crowded house for Bridesmaids. Perfect movie choice for a rainy day after brunch with a group o' friends. Given how consistently the entire theater was LOLing -- including our row -- you'd think the film could've knocked Thor right off the Bifrost.
A Truth: Wiig's Penis Imitation > Thor's Hammer.
But I guess a great audience response and word of mouth is what second weekends are for. I expect Bridesmaids will have major box office legs and the tiniest of percentage dips next weekend. It's much funnier than The Hangover (2009) to which it's often compared (for plot and especially marketing reasons) and that film, which opened stronger, only dipped 27% and 18% in its 2nd and 3rd weekends going on to a very substantial gross. I'm guessing we see something very similar with Kristen Wiig & Co, at least percentage wise, in the next couple of weekends. I hope The Hangover II doesn't eat into its potential audience in the coming weeks. The wolf pack already had its turn.
The Box Office (Actuals)
01 THOR $34.7 (cumulative $119.4) [review]
02 BRIDESMAIDS new $26.2
03 FAST FIVE $20.4 (cumulative $169.6)
04 PRIEST new $14.9
05 RIO $8.2 (cumulative $125.2)
06 JUMPING THE BROOM $7.0 (cumulative $25.7)
07 SOMETHING BORROWED $6.8 (cumulative $25.5)
08 WATER FOR ELEPHANTS $4.2 (cumulative $48.5) [review]
09 TYLER PERRY MADEA'S BIG HAPPY FAMILY $2.2 (cumulative $50.2)
10 SOUL SURFER $1.8 (cumulative $39.2)
What did you see this weekend? I'll try to write up Bridesmaids soon. I have a few things to say about it but they feel too entirely jumbled and disparate to make sense of this morning.
Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig, Priest, Thor, box office
Reader Comments (12)
I spent the weekend watching old movies in Westchester - Alice's Restaurant on Saturday night and Alain Resnais' extremely hard to track down Providence on Sunday. both excellent in veerrryyyyyy different ways. Pretty sure I made the right choice vs, say, Thor and Bridesmaids (though I'm going to see the latter one of these days, too)!
This movie just looks fabulous, and it's great to see it doing so well at the box-office. The world needs to embrace Kristen Wiig!!
Roark -- hard to track down movies are always the right choice over new releases. Though they're frustrating to blog about since no one else can see them :)
I saw Bridesmaids on Saturday. Two or three of the big comedy set-pieces worked well but the rest of the film was only worth a giggle and it went on too long. Overall, it was a decent film but nothing I'm too eager to see again soon.
I saw Bridemaids. I loved it in spite of it kind of being a narrative mess. There are about three movies thrown together with the tenuous through-line of "30-something woman is spiraling out of control with no end in sight"--romcom with the cop, battle for attention with Rose Byrne, buddy comedy with the bridal party. All of the stories work, they just don't all come together as well as they could have. However, the amazingly funny scenes (airplane, wrestling, bridal shower, dress fitting, flagging the cop down) more than made up for the overly ambitious screenplay. And I'm now tempted to watch Mike and Molly solely because of Melissa McCarthy's performance here.
One of my personal hobby horses is the lack of respect comedic performances get versus dramatic come Oscar time - particularly vexing since comedy is tougher than drama to execute. How about it, Nathaniel...can Kristen Wiig get some love when the next revision of the Best Actress predictions comes out?
I agree with Carl. An actor who can do comedy can also do drama but i don't think that goes vice-versa.
BRIDESMAID! Should be Academy award nominated for Best O. Screenplay. Best Sup. Actress M.McCarthey & Best Actress K. Wiig
"Though they're frustrating to blog about since no one else can see them :)"
I can imagine! And I hope you didn't take what I wrote as a dig at you for writing about Bridesmaids or something. I can't wait to see that one, too (even though I did, technically), and it sounds like you had a blast, which is *also* always the right choice when going to the movies. :)
I saw Bridesmaids (which saw me in an almost perpetual state of awkward joy) and Everything Must Go (which might be my favorite film, thus far, of 2011).
Bridesmaids was amazzzzzzing! Seeing it again this weekend! Kristen Wiig is a star now.
Roark - no. i didn't take it as a dig. I'msensitive but not THAT hyper sensitive ;)
Orion -- it's my wish that bridesmaids success will make people go back to WHIP IT. she was really good in that too and that movie is also a joy.