What’s remarkable about that admission is a studio would have been thrilled with a comedy opening at $25 million in summer 2005… and barring a Ryan Reynolds superhero spectacle, I suspect most studios would be happy with a comedy opening to $25 million right now as well. For context, Wedding Crashers opened bigger than Vaughn’s PG-13 antics the year before in Dodgeball, and Wilson’s PG-13 bid at IP exploitation with Stiller also in 2004, Starsky & Hutch. It also opened bigger than Anchorman and Zoolander. And it opened in second.
The same weekend that Wedding Crashers came out, it was beaten on the leaderboards by WB’s own new release, the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Perhaps a harbinger of things to come, the original adult-skewing movie lost out to a family-friendly play toward mining nostalgia with a familiar brand. Although back then, Burton and Johnny Depp’s treatment of Willy Wonka certainly couldn’t be considered wholly “safe” for those who missed Gene Wilder and the O.G Oompa Loompas. Compare that to 2023’s Wonka, which played as a “prequel” to Wilder while completely neutering the character’s vague menace.
More pertinent to the time capsule nature of that summer though is that there was room for two big hits to open in the same weekend. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grossed $56.2 million, and Wedding Crashers $32.2 million. That’s about $92 million and $52 million in 2025 dollars, respectively. By comparison the biggest original comedy released in theaters this year (so not based on a video game, comic book, or Stephen King short story) is probably Celine Song’s Materialists, which debuted at $11 million last month. But even that I’d actually argue was barely a comedy, despite what the marketing suggested, and it also was an indie produced by A24.
Instead one might have to go back to 2024 to find an original studio comedy like Fly Me to the Moon… which opened to $9 million before grossing $42 million globally.
By comparison, Wedding Crashers grossed more than $50 million in its first three days when adjusted for inflation, opened in second place, and then had what was fairly characterized in the press as a “sleeper hit” run. In its second weekend, it dropped only 19 percent at the box office; in its third it fell another mere 22 percent and leapfrogged past Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to become the number one movie in America.
Wedding Crashers would go on to play in North American cinemas until December, grossing $209 million domestically and $289 million worldwide (or about $475 million today). It ended its run as the fifth biggest movie of the year domestically, earning more than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or for that matter Batman Begins and Fantastic Four.
