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Girls' Night Out! Dudes stay home!

Kim Hollis: Bridesmaids, aka The Chick Hangover, opened to $26.3 million. What do you take from this result? Also, do you believe this will be a leggy project?

Josh Spiegel: First of all, can someone explain to me what makes Bridesmaids the female version of The Hangover? Aside from both films sharing a similarly weird and wacky Zach Galifianakis-esque sidekick, I'm not seeing much of a comparison. (And I say this only hours after seeing Bridesmaids.) What this proves is what is always proven in the world: people will see pretty much anything as long as you sell it right. Clearly, Bridesmaids' biggest selling point is its word-of-mouth (it's pretty funny, though about 20 minutes too long) and that pretty much every critic in the country is raving about it. It also helps that Bridesmaids is opening on a weekend with no other new competition; also, bringing The Hangover back into the conversation, Bridesmaids is beating that film's sequel to the multiplexes, which can only help. I can definitely see this being a movie with legs, but it really depends on how much Hangover: Part Deux does and how much of the audience it steals.

Tom Houseman: Josh, I don't know if you've been smoking out of the wrong end of the crack pipe lately, but Bridesmaids was blatantly advertising itself as "The Hangover with Vaginas!" Word-of-mouth doesn't make for a big opening weekend, because of course nobody has seen the movie yet. There was a lot of anticipation for this movie because the commercials looked great, it's gotten very good reviews (90% to Hangover's 79%) and it was "The Hangover with Vaginas!"





I have no doubt that people who have seen the movie will note that they're very different movies, and good word-of-mouth is what will make it leggy (although I take offense to referring to a movie about women with such misogynistic terms), but that doesn't change the fact that this movie's initial success can largely be attributed to the fact that everyone thinks it's "THE HANGOVER WITH VAGINAS!"

Edwin Davies: There's been a pretty serious dearth of both good comedies and good films aimed at women recently - I'd consider this to be the main reason why Something Borrowed opened to more than $10 million last weekend (it wasn't good, but it was a comedy aimed at women and beggars can't be choosers) - and Bridesmaids has come along at just the right time to take advantage.

Based both on the track record of previous Judd Apatow productions, which have displayed terrific staying power so long as the reviews and word-of-mouth are there (and as long as they aren't a million hours long and don't feature a tacked on romantic subplot in the final third), and the fact that it acts as de facto counterprogramming to Pirates 4, it looks likely to have a strong second weekend next week, which would feed the word-of-mouth for the film. Even the arrival of The Dude Bridesmaids: Part Two in a few weeks might not hurt it too much.

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