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 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.
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. 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. 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.
. 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
See TIME’s special report “Summer Entertainment Preview 2011.”
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
