In the contest between two movies in which one man is forced to take on an entire fraternity of villains, Neighbors edged out The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to take the top spot this weekend, debuting with $51.1 million. It’s a victory that also earned Neighbors a vaunted place on all sorts of other, very specific charts, including making it one of the top three highest openings for R-rated comedies, and second all-time in “College Comedy Openings,” where it ranks just behind that classic tale of raunchy college shenanigans, Monsters University. It’s also the biggest opening ever for “Movies In Which You See Seth Rogen’s Face,” and likely guaranteed to remain the all-time No. 1 among “Movies Where You See Seth Rogen’s Face Making Out With Rose Byrne’s Face, And Look, Just Go With It.”
Among the two newcomers to the Top 10, Moms’ Night Out rode the current craze for “faith-based” entertainment all the way to seventh place, where it rested. The comedy earned $4.2 million from audiences who were eager to see some good, Christian ladies cut loose and briefly ignore the laws of Leviticus for one wild evening, sometimes wearing clothing woven of as many as three kinds of material. And Legends Of Oz: Dorothy’s Return rode the everlasting craze for mining as much as possible from the public domain—even if it means attaching the voices of Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Kelsey Grammer to the kind of severe computer graphics used as a rasp, to shape the rods and cones of toddler eyes—all the way to eighth place, with $3.7 million.
And in limited release, given the choice between Chef, a movie where Jon Favreau lingers over delicious sandwiches, and Fed Up, a documentary where Katie Couric rails against delicious sandwiches, audiences overwhelmingly chose the former. Chef earned $204,000 to Fed Up’s $130,000, despite Fed Up being in three times as many theaters, and so the edict is clear: Shut it, Katie Couric. America wants a sandwich. And finally, in the contest between indie films made by actors working in wildly varying degrees of self-indulgence, the James Franco-written-and-starring-and-engaging-in-relentless-bids-for-viral-promotion Palo Alto ($80,600 in four theaters) trumped God’s Pocket from John Slattery ($23,400 in three theaters), suggesting that, in his future efforts, Slattery might be wise to post more embarrassing things on Instagram.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.