NEW YORK – At the movies, idiocy never goes out of style.
Twenty years after the 1994 original, Dumb and Dumber To opened with $38.1 million at the weekend box office, according to studio estimates Sunday. The sequel debuted almost exactly two decades after the Farrelly brothers first introduced the Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels low-IQ duo.
Dumb and Dumber To edged out the animated adventure Big Hero 6, which took in $36 million in its second week. Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar slid to third in its second week with an estimated $29.2 million.
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about Dumb and Dumber To
The top three films took up the lion share of the box office, with the no. 4 film, the romance Beyond the Lights, opening with a distant $6.5 million.
Beyond the Lights was fourth with $6.5 million and Gone Girl followed with $4.6 million.
In a Hollywood constantly updating, rebooting and sequalizing old properties, Dumb and Dumber To was still unique. In between installments, there was also a 2003 prequel, though it was made with different actors and wasn’t directly by Bobby and Peter Farrelly.
Most delayed sequels — Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — depend on the addition of a new, younger star like Shia LaBeouf. The closest comparison to Dumb and Dumber To might be 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000, made 18 years after the original. But with John Goodman stepping in for John Belushi, it opened with just $6.1 million.
Staying power is rare in comedy, where chemistry is especially difficult to regain. But Dumb and Dumber To gave moviegoers a chance to see Carrey back in his old, physically comedic form. It’s his best live-action debut since 2003’s Bruce Almighty.
The box office was boosted by a handful of independent films including St. Vincent ($4 million in its sixth weekend) and Birdman ($2.5 million in its fifth weekend) as well as the limited released debuts of Foxcatcher and Jon Stewart’s Rosewater.
Next weekend will be dominated by the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1.
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