I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry Out-Potters Weekend Box Office

Now we can't say we saw this coming - borderline homophobic knockabout Adam Sandler comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry has toppled Harry Potter from the top of the weekend box office after just one measly week.

It was a close-run thing, though - less than $2 million separated I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry from Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix at the US weekend box office - but the simple fact is that a basic lowest-common denominator about two firemen larking about doing stereotypically homosexual things for cheap laughs is now bigger than the biggest-selling series of books of all time, a fact reflected in the recent decision to make an overlong, overserious sequel to I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry where our two mock-gay heroes get killed fighting a noseless evil wizard and do something about a horcrux that seems like a bit of an anticlimax really.

Of course, there's a perfectly good reason why I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry - a retrogressive Adam Sandler film that looks like it couldn't be dumber if it was made out of hair - managed to beat Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix at the weekend box office, and that's because anyone with even a passing interest in Harry Potter was at home discovering that the owl dies quite near the beginning of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and thinking "Christ, I waited two years for THIS?" But, hey, here's the US weekend box office top five…

1 - I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry (Seriously, we have no idea why I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry is number one at the US weekend box office. Perhaps it's down to the absence of the tagline "You Get To See It Going In!" on the movie posters) $34,775,000

2 - Harry Potter And The Order of The Phoenix (A challenge - why not read a bunch of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows spoilers and see how long you can last without getting thrown out of a screening of Harry Potter Of The Order Of The Phoenix by shouting out "He dies! Death Eater gets him!" each time any of the characters who get killed by Death Eaters in Deathly Hallows appear onscreen. 12 minutes is our current record) $32,185,000

3 - Hairspray (Pfft. Men dressed as fat women is so February 2006. And January 2006. And February 2007) $27,800,000

4 - Transformers (Featuring a horrific new kind of dogging where giant robots stand around watching two humans have sex on the bonnet of a giant robot that's turned into a car, getting more and more silently aroused with each passing second) $20,506,000

5 - Ratatouille (Thanks to Ratatouille, we've decided to only eat in restaurants where rats help to prepare the food. Or kebab vans as they're more commonly known) $11,000,000

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Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo