Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno pedaled a phallus-adorned bicycle straight to the top of the box office this weekend, earning an estimated $30.4 million in 2,756 theaters — not bad for an R-rated, 2-D, gay-themed non-sequel featuring not a single racist Transformer! Even so, while it was good enough to beat Borat’s $26.5 million opening in 2007, that movie debuted in just 837 theaters and went on to make $28.3 million in its second weekend after it expanded to more. Also, Brüno’s 39 percent Friday-to-Saturday drop (“one of the steepest on record,†notes Box Office Mojo) probably doesn’t bode well for the weekends to come.
Another metric by which Brüno will probably short of Borat: litigation. Despite the movie’s merciless pranking of so many innocent-seeming, reasonable-acting non-public figures, Brüno has thus far yielded just one measly court filing — which is already totally evaporating! Last month, a California woman sued Baron Cohen for assaulting her at a 2007 bingo tournament and causing the emotional distress that later, somehow, made her fall, hit her head, and require a wheelchair (adding insult to injury, her scene was cut from the movie). Over the weekend, following a review of a videotape of the bingo incident provided by filmmakers, Richelle Olson and her lawyer withdrew the assault-and-battery charges from her original complaint.
So, if it’s any comfort to Universal, it seems highly unlikely they’ll need to spend very much of Brüno’s still-pretty-good first-weekend take fighting slam-dunk lawsuits.
Weekend Report: ‘Bruno’ Not as Brawny as ‘Borat’ [Box Office Mojo]
’Bruno’ bingo victim drops assault and battery claims [THR, Esq./HR]