NEW YORK — Melissa McCarthy left the guys of Entourage in the dust, landing her first No. 1 box-office debut as a leading lady with an estimated $30 million weekend for the espionage comedy Spy.
The result added to the string of successes for McCarthy and writer-director Paul Feig, who first united on the 2011 hit Bridesmaids. While Spy fell short of the $39.1 million debut of their 2013 comedy The Heat, with Sandra Bullock, and came in a tad lower than some predicted, it was good enough to win a weekend lacking blockbuster punch but crowded with action, horror and the resurrected TV series.
The action-heavy Spy, made for about $65 million, will depend on word-of-mouth and its generally glowing reviews to propel it further in the coming weeks. The film, in which McCarthy plays a desk-bound CIA officer sent into a James Bond-like European caper, has already made $56.5 million overseas.
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Last week’s top film, San Andreas, the disaster movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, slid to second place with $26.4 million. Insidious: Chapter 3 opened with an estimated $23 million, a strong debut for the low-budget horror prequel.
But Entourage, made for about $30 million, failed to compete with those releases. The film, released about four years after the series concluded, made $10.4 million over the weekend and has brought in a five-day total of $17.8 million since opening Wednesday.
Mad Max: Fury Road rolled along with another $8 million, followed by Pitch Perfect 2 ($7.7 million), B.C.-shot Tomorrowland ($7 million), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($6.2 million), Aloha ($3.3 million) and the made-in-Toronto Poltergeist ($2.8 million).
In a medium-sized release, the acclaimed drama Love & Mercy, which stars Paul Dano and John Cusack as Brian Wilson, opened with $2.2 million on 483 screens.
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