Meanwhile, ’The Meg’ continued to hold well in its second weekend.
The big story coming out of this weekend’s box-office numbers, and deservedly so, is that movies with all Asian-American casts can succeed at the box office, which Crazy Rich Asians — the first movie with an all Asian cast in the 25 years since Joy Luck Club — proved by racking up $24.2 million over the weekend and $33.2 million since it debuted on Wednesday ( Joy Luck Club, conversely, earned only $32 million over its entire run in 1993). That’s huge because it means that studios will be far more willing to take risks on movies like Crazy Rich Asians, which means a large segment of the American population will see more representation in the movies they watch (the composition of the opening weekend audience for Crazy Rich Asians was 38 percent Asian moviegoers). Everyone involved in the film should be taking a huge victory lap this weekend, if only for that reason alone.
However, the performance of Crazy Rich Asians also proves something else: That romantic comedies are still a viable genre for multiplexes, so long as the product is actually good, and Crazy Rich Asians is exactly that: A phenomenal, romantic, entertaining and funny crowd-pleaser that both critics and audiences alike enjoyed (it fetched 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an A Cinemascore).
The last time a romantic comedy played this well in theaters was Amy Schumer’s 2015 movie Trainwreck and there have only been a handful of rom-coms to break $30 million in their first five days dating back to 2009’s The Proposal (written by Pete Chiarelli, who also co-wrote… Crazy Rich Asians).
That’s huge news for romantic comedy fans after studios had seemingly all but given up on them (these days, they’re more likely to be found on Netflix than in theaters). It’s even better news for Crazy Rich Asians’ stars Henry Golding and Constance Wu, because if the romcom does make a comeback, they’re well positioned to be the Matthew McConaughey and Katherine Heigl of the next romcom cycle, although hopefully they’ll be pickier in how they pick their projects.
