Badly in need of a breakout hit after successive misfires, Universal will have to keep waiting.
Its 216-minute Judd Apatow dramedy “Funny People” opened to $23.4 million this weekend, which was good enough to lead the domestic box office and in line with other Apatow openings.
However, with the film declining 15% on Saturday from its $8.6 million opening Friday, “Funny People” did not achieve the four-quadrant breakout success that some tracking estimates had predicted.
For her part, Nikki Rocco, president of domestic distribution for Universal, said such prognostications – which put the film above the $25 million for its first weekend -- were unreasonable, given that “Funny People,” which stars Adam Sandler as a terminally ill comedian, represents a novel, far more serious offering from Apatow than audiences are used to.
“If you haven’t seen this movie, tracking numbers could be misinterpreted,” she said. “The big day next week will be Saturday. I think this movie, like a James L. Brooks film, will evolve, and I think it will find an audience.”
If “Funny People,” which costs a reported $70 million to make, is to find the legs Rocco suggests that it is capable of, it’s going to have to overcome lukewarm reviews, many of which have expressed concerns over length.
This summer, other R-rated comedies have found legs: Warner’s “The Hangover” remains in the top 10 after nine weeks, declining only 21% this weekend and finishing with a domestic cume of $255.8 million; Disney’s “The Proposal,” meanwhile, was down only 24% week-to-week and is now up to $148.9 million in North America.
“But you look at the creative (for ‘Funny People,’) and it suggested that this wasn’t the happiest of movies,” a rival studio source noted. “It’s a tough market for that kind of thing right now. People are looking for comedies that take them out of their situation and make them laugh.”
Certainly, lighter PG-rated fare, such as Warner’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” is doing just that.
Buoyed by the long-awaited opening of the film in IMAX 3D theaters, the sixth “Potter” film enjoyed a resurgent weekend, finishing in second place with $17.7 million, just a 40% drop from week two.
With its domestic cume now standing at $255.5 million, “Potter 6” is pacing ahead of the franchise’s last installment, 2007’s highly successful “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which had garnered only $242 million after three weeks of release.
“As good as those numbers are, they would have been a whole lot better had the film been able to open in 3D upon availability,” said a rival studio source, noting that “Potter” was kept out of IMAX 3D locations until July 29 due to those outlets’ contractual arrangement with Paramount for “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”
Meanwhile, also sustaining itself well amid family audiences was Disney’s guinea-pig themed “G-Force.”
The 3D film, half CGI and half live action, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, starring Will Arnett and Zach Galifianakis, and voice starring Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz and Tracy Morgan, took in another $17.1
