It may not have been a hit among the critics but there was no stopping Mrs Brown over the weekend, as D'Movie written by Brendan O'Carroll took in €5.4 million in the UK in its first 48 hours, enough to propel it to number one at the box office.
Universal’s big screen outing for the wildly popular small screen sitcom was on show in 522 cinemas across the UK, taking in an average of €10,292 per screen in just 48 hours. This is higher than more critically acclaimed films like Wolf of Wall St or 12 Years A Slave managed earlier this year.
The film did even better closer to home, recording the biggest ever opening day for a local film and the biggest opening day for any film in 2014.
All told, Mrs Brown’s Boys: D’Movie took in just over €1m at the Irish box office on its first weekend, making it the most successful locally produced film of all time and the third most successful comedy opening in history. It was beaten into third place in the all time laughter stakes by The Hangover 2 and Ted, two films which also suffered a pasting at the hands of the critics.
To put the film's runaway success into perspective, its take at box offices in Ireland and the UK made it the 11th most popular film in the world last week.
Its success is in spite of some savage reviews by critics since its release. Alan Corr in the RTE Guide described it as "the least fun I've ever had in a darkened room" and Mike McCahill in the Guardian said that while the film was "never aggressively, in-your-face bad", it was "more a flatly indifferent cash-in".
This newspaper's critic Donald Clarke was kinder. While he gave D'Movie two stars and described it is "overstretched, underwritten [AND]sluggishly paced" he also commended O'Carroll for his "heavenly timing" and said the film had "its heart very much in the right place[WITH] eulogies to inclusion, tradition and open-mindedness".
The critics might have had stern words to say about his creation, but based on the film’s success so far, O’Carroll looks set to have the last laugh.
