Come With Ben Stiller If You Want to Live
That's the lesson for this big boffo box office Memorial Day weekend, which saw the further ascension of the Stills, as well as screenwriters/Reno: 911! costars Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, who just keep churning out the hits. Poor skull-busting Terminator, a film that seems to be in trouble.
1) Night at the Museum 2: Panic! at the Smithsonian — $70 million
Now, that's $70 million over a four day period, from Thursday to Sunday. But, still. Huge numbers, biggest ever, in fact, for Stiller. And, if the funnyman and his golden boy writing team agree to it, the film's success just near about guarantees a threequel. Une Nuit à la Louvre, perhaps? Mona Lisa comes alive and smirks enigmatically at everyone (to be played by Anne Hathaway)! While Stiller's continued success seems increasingly smug and middlebrow, we are pleased for Lennon and Garant, who hopefully now will have the freedom to write the weirdest, profanest stuff they can dream up and still get a green light.
2) Terminator Salvation — $53.8 million
Am I going to walk around and rip your fucking movie down, in the middle of Memorial Day weekend? Then why the fuck are you giving my boring action flick bad word of mouth? Ah da da dah, like this, all over town. What the fuck is it with you? What don't you fucking understand? You got any fucking idea about, hey, it's fucking disappointing having somebody walking up behind someone in the middle of the fucking movie theater line and saying "Don't go see Terminator, cause it sucks"? Give me a fucking answer! What don't you get about it? Oh, so you saw Night at the Museum with your kid instead of my movie? Ohhhhh, goooood for you. And how was it? I hope it was fucking good, because it's useless now, isn't it?
3) Star Trek — $29.4 million
The force is still strong in this one! Hyperdriving to a lightsaber-hot $191 million in just a few weeks, the film is set to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs—a new record! Soaring high through the clouds of Bespin, this swashbuckling space opera is sending the competition barrel-rolling down into the murky swamps of Dagobah. Sy Snoodles will be singing this movie's praises for eons, like a beautiful pop culture icon being slowly digested over a period of a thousand years by the mighty Sarlacc.
4) Angels & Demons — $27.7 million
Well good for everyone here. The film dropped less than 60% in its second week at the rodeo. While international numbers are sure to remain high for a lil' bit, this installment of the Dan Brown every-chapter-ends-with-a-cliffhanger-just-like-Fear Street religio-mystery series will not come close to its predecessor The Da Vinci Code's big returns. But no one really expected to, and every summer one or two movies do just OK, mostly lost and forgotten in the sea of churning robots and angry wizards and troubled museum guards who—wait, why is he in DC now?
5) Dance Flick — $13.1 million
A new generation of Wayans is welcomed into our hearts, as this a-few-years-too-late parody of films like Save the Last Stomping for When It's Time to Step Up does solid numbers in a super-crowded holiday weekend. We're pretty excited for the upcoming spoof Holiday-Time Family Cameo Comedy, in which Marlon Wayans Jr. plays a museum guard who must suddenly become a dad while driving a taxicab full of alien kids and then it's all 3D animation and Seth Rogen and a bunch of SNL people (or people pretending to be them, hilariously!) show up and everyone chuckles and forgets what they saw thirty minutes after leaving the theater.