Weekend Box Office: Adults finally get the talking, humping teddy bears they've been waiting for
After being deluged with family-friendly movies for much of the summer so far, America saw its first opportunity to indulge in more adult fare and leapt on it with gleeful abandon, turning their children loose on the streets with bindles and apologetic notes pinned to their chests and escaping to the multiplex. That meant huge gains for Ted and Magic Mike as well as orphanages, as the box office became dominated by R-rated raunch. Seth MacFarlane's shit-talking teddy bear scored $54.1 million overall, beating out The Hangover to become the biggest debuting original R-rated comedy of all time; no doubt the franchise-starved Universal is already pushing Seth MacFarlane to begin drafting sequel ideas, maybe where Ted meets other foulmouthed stuffed animals and they have to save Christmas or something.
And speaking of air-humping bears, Magic Mike threw itself a huge bachelorette party on Friday night, scooping up just shy of $40 million sweaty, wadded-up singles thanks to shameless marketing that did everything but broadcast ads on a secret frequency that can only heard by vaginas, but Steven Soderbergh's male stripper revue still saw its numbers drop dramatically by the time Sunday morning shame set in. Unless its ad campaign shifts gears dramatically, it's expected to continue falling—dashing hopes of a sequel where Channing Tatum meets some new strippers and they all have to save Christmas or something.
As predicted, Tyler Perry continued to fulfill the all the lowered expectations of Tyler Perry's audience, with Tyler Perry's Madea's Witness Protection taking $26.3 million and all the apostrophes to land at an appropriately mediocre fourth place—an opening "propelled mainly by older African-American women," or possibly just men pretending to be them. And much like last week's appropriately understated fiery death for Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, the $4.3 million, tenth-place opening for the Elizabeth Banks-Chris Pine drama People Like Us continues to prove that early summer is a difficult time to put smaller movies in wide release, even those with plot contrivances you can see from space. (On the bright side, it makes the title sound ironic, and that's always fun.)
In comparison, Sundance hit Beasts Of The Southern Wild had a relatively killer $42,250 per-screen average—nearly 20 times the $2,095 average of what People Like Us took in—even while showing in only four theaters, and the also limited-release Take This Waltz took in around $5,000 per its 30 theaters. Meanwhile, the similarly sort-of-modest Moonrise Kingdom seems poised to be the real sleeper hit of the summer: It expanded its theater count slightly and saw a 40-percent rise in audiences, meaning it will soon be Wes Anderson's highest-grossing film after The Royal Tenenbaums.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.