But as those aforementioned numbers bear out, for the past 10 years, live-action comedies have struggled to come close to the same box office heights as films that aren't exclusively engineered to make audiences laugh.

Otherwise, you have to go back to the start of the 2000s before live-action comedies did this well at the box office, including 2002's Austin Powers in Goldmember ($73.1 million) and 2001's Rush Hour 2 ($67.4 million) - and 2003's Scary Movie 3 ($63.5 million, adjusted), 2001's American Pie 2 ($63.5 million, adjusted), 2000's The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps ($62.8 million, adjusted), and 2000's Scary Movie ($62.5 million, adjusted).Īnimated features and franchise action movies that are packed with laughs have certainly thrived over the past decade - The Avengers, one of the highest-grossing films of all time, has some of the best laugh-out-loud moments of any movie in recent memory. Adjusting for inflation brightens the picture for live-action comedy only a bit more, pushing 2008's Sex and the City to a $63.2 million opening in 2014 dollars. It's also the best-ever opening weekend for stars Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, and Ice Cube - although not for the film's white hot directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose The LEGO Movie opened with $69.1 million in February and remains the top grossing film of the year domestically.īut here is where it gets interesting: A live-action comedy hasn't opened this well since 2011's The Hangover Part II ($85.9 million) - and before that, no live-action comedy opened past $60 million before 2003's Bruce Almighty ($68 million). 22 Jump Street opened this weekend with an estimated $60 million, almost twice the debut of 21 Jump Street, which opened in March 2012 with $36.3 million.

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