comedy sells

While perusing the USA Box Office for this weekend, at the wonderful Box Office Mojo, and noting that the boy wizard was still number one, and the science fiction flick Aeon Flux opened with $13 million, I continued down the list and realised that the summer comedy, The Wedding Crashers, is still on release (21 weeks!) and continues to pull in money.

It was made for a budget of $40 million, and so far has cashed in $209,107,000 in the USA (if you include overseas markets that jumps to $282,794,600). The film is now available on DVD, and yet it still has an audience in the cinema.

I’ve got to write a comedy script.

I did enjoy The Wedding Crashers, but it’s far from a perfect–it becomes quite disjointed in the last third of the film. I like The 40-year-old Virgin more. Incidentally, that made $166,119,641 worldwide, was on release in the USA for 15 weeks, and was made for a budget of $26 million.

I think the success of both of the films, in particular The Wedding Crashers, was boosted because of the overall woeful content of the summer releases. Both films are fresh funny stories, and didn’t harbour any illusions about their content.

As I’ve said before, this is the way Hollywood needs to go: original lower-budget films, with smart scripts, and an interesting cast.