Looks like this shit just got real. Energising an UK box office that had become rather low-key and unexciting of late, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s scrumtrillescent cop comedy, Hot Fuzz, has stormed to the top of the charts, bringing the noise with a magnificent £5.9 million.
Yes, that’s right. £5.9 million. In just five days. In about two days’ time, it will become 2007’s highest grossing flick to date while, to put it into further perspective, Shaun Of The Dead made just under £6.5 million in its entire UK theatrical run. Hot Fuzz is also now the highest-grossing British cop movie since The Boys In Blue, which made roughly £812 trillion back in 1982.
Naturally, Empire would like to claim most of, if not all of the credit for Fuzz’ stunning opening weekend, given our hot and fuzzy coverage both online and off (our action issue, with Pegg on the cover, is still on sale NOW!!!), but we’ll have to concede that Pegg, Wright and Nick Frost deserve a hearty pat on the back for making that rarest of things: a fantastically entertaining British film that people actually want to see. (Also, their valiant attempt to appear in every newspaper supplement ever printed and every TV show ever made might have had something to do with it...)
Fuzz posted an astonishing screen average of £13,860 – way ahead of anything else in the UK Top 10 – and, if word of mouth plays its part, we can see a prevailing wind blowing the Gloucestershire-based comedy to £20 million or thereabouts. It opens in the States soon – should be interesting to see how it goes down in the home of the action movie…
Elsewhere in the UK, new entries Because I Said So, Eklavya: The Royal Guard and The Science Of Sleep didn’t even gross a million quid between them, while the likes of Music & Lyrics and Charlotte’s Web held up fairly well in the face of a Fuzzular onslaught. Sadly, though, Goal 2 isn’t exactly Living The Dream – after two weeks, the second part of Disney’s football trilogy has limped to £800,000. Will we ever see Part 3 now?