Box Office: 'Dumb And Dumber To' Nabs $14.2M Friday

Dumb and Dumber To is proving to be a smart investment for all parties, as it debuted with a rather robust opening day figure. The Universal (Comcast ) release earned a strong $14.2 million on its opening Friday, a total that includes $1.6m in Thursday sneaks. The picture of course reunites Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels with directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly twenty years after the first Dumb and Dumber. Putting aside the fact that I didn’t like the sequel, I am always happy when a film outperforms the tracking, so thus I am happy that Dumb and Dumber To is proving to be a more robust sequel than I anticipated.
The picture cost $40m to produce and should get awfully close to that number by the end of Sunday, give or take front-loading. The film should end the frame with over/under $40m for the weekend (it would take a 2.8x weekend multiplier, which is possible if not overly plausible), although a more front-loaded $36m debut would be no defeat. That is of course well-above the $16.3m debut of the original Dumb and Dumber. Although interestingly enough the film’s adjusted-for-inflation debut is $31m, which means that, depending on how big the weekend ends up being, the upswing is mostly due to twenty years of ticket price hikes and the like.

As the weekend rolls on, I am most curious to see the age demographics for this one. By the way, this was Carrey’s biggest debut weekend since Bruce Almighty ($67m, still his top debut) back in 2003. Although we shouldn’t be surprised that the likes of I Love You Phillip Morris or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind didn’t quite open as well as Liar, Liar. Will this be a case of mostly older men who grew up on the original ditching their families for the night to bask in the glow of generational nostalgia?  Or did the film score well enough with the kids of today and/or were parents dragging their kids along with them to the PG-13 comedy?
As tempting as it might be to write this one off as a one-weekend nostalgia tour (a B- Cinemascore rating isn’t promising), there isn’t a ton of multiplex movies dropping over the next few weeks and this one stands a strong chance of being the consensus pick for big groups of multi-age/multi-gender moviegoers who don’t want cartoons, 3-hour space dramas, or sequels to franchises of which they haven’t seen the first two chapters.
The only other wide release of the weekend was Relativity’s Beyond the Lights. The African-American-targeted romantic drama is from writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose 2000 hit Love and Basketball is a nostalgic icon of an era when films like Love and Basketball were somewhat less rare. The film is the first release in Relativity’s “multicultural division” which presumably will make smaller-budgeted multiplex fare that don’t center exclusively on white males. As such I was somewhat hoping that Beyond the Lights would make $100 million this weekend, but its $2.3m Friday and projected $6.6m weekend debut on 1,750 screens is pretty okay too. The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who I would love to see get an Oscar nomination for Belle, however unfortunately unlikely that is. 
Also debuting in semi-wide release Jon Stewart’s directorial debut Rosewater. The “based on a true story” drama about am Iranian/Canadian BBC reporter who ends up imprisoned in Iran and accused of being a spy debuted on 371 screens and earned $422,000 on Friday for a projected $1.3m opening frame and an okay $3,504 per-screen average. It’s only getting any attention because of its world-famous director, but kudos to Stewart for using his clout to get a film like this made in the first place. That’s how stardom is supposed to work. Kirk Cameron’s Stealing Christmas also debuted this weekend in 400 screens, and I’ll update you on that one if Friday numbers come in.