Universal Pictures
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Hey, congratulations on the great weekend, box office. You did it! USA! USA! USA! ‘Ted’ and ‘Magic Mike’ y’all! Two very different movies, but two staggering returns. As a matter of fact ‘Ted’ – the story of a talking teddy bear and thick Boston accents – became the highest grossing R rated non-sequel comedy ever. Sure those are a bunch of descriptors, but $54.1 million is a nice return for Seth MacFarlane, or as I like to refer to him as, the ruler of the world. Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper “comedy” ‘Magic Mike’ also exceeded expectations checking in with a cool $39.2 million. All in all, a good summer weekend for good summer movies.
But enough about those movies! What does their success say about us! I like to think it means, we’re game for anything. Summer movies don’t necessarily have to be SUMMER MOVIES, ya know? It doesn’t all need to be explosions and comic book characters and using voice overs as a crutch when plot points need to be explained, but no one’s clever enough to do it without expositing all over the place. Nope. They can simply be about talking teddy bears and male strippers. Period. End of sentence. And in the case of ‘Magic Mike’ it can be deceptively more clever than it lets on. In the end, we’ve got two sleepers. In the same weekend! When was the last time that happened? Seriously. When? Five dollars to the first person to give the right answer. (NOTE: No one’s winning five dollars).
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‘Brave’ ‘Madea Madea Madea Madea Madea’ and ‘Madagascar 3’ rounded out the top five with $34, $26.4 and $11.8 million respectively.
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As summer movie season progresses, we swing (wait til you see what I’m doing with this) in 4th of July weekend with ‘The Amazing Spider Man’ (BECAUSE HE SWINGS!) and, believe it or not, I’m actually pretty excited for it!
