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New York — The controversial FIFA movie, United Passions, bombed at the box office. It opened in 10 cinemas across the US and earned a measly $607.
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 $30m 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 $39.1m 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 HBO series.
"It sets the table for a fantastic long run," said Chris Aronson, head of distribution for 20th Century Fox.
The R-rated, action-heavy Spy, made for about $65m, 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 $56.5m overseas.
Last week's top film, San Andreas, the disaster movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, slid to second place with $26.4m.
Insidious: Chapter 3 opened with an estimated $23m, a strong debut for the low-budget horror prequel from Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions.
But HBO's Entourage, made for about $30m, failed to compete with those releases. The film, released about four years after the series concluded, made $10.4m over the weekend and has brought in a five-day total of $17.8m since opening Wednesday.
In a medium-sized release, the acclaimed Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions drama Love & Mercy, which stars Paul Dano and John Cusack as Brian Wilson, opened with $2.2m on 483 screens.
