The Inbetweeners Movie becomes third biggest grosser of year at UK box office

The Inbetweeners Movie made it a hat-trick atop the UK box office, becoming the third biggest grosser of the year so far. Entertainment’s comedy surpassed summer tentpoles Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover Part II and Transformers: Dark Of The Moon on the yearly chart after grossing a further $5.9m (£3.7m) to stand at an impressive $56.4m (£35.0m).

It’s unlikely to catch The King’s Speech’s haul of $73.6m (£45.7m) as the second biggest grosser of the year, but a drop of only 35% in its third weekend suggests the £40m mark is a distinct possibility.

Solid holdovers combined with generally lacklustre openings for new entries meant that Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, One Day and The Smurfs occupied second to fourth on the chart for the second week in a row.

Fox’s Apes prequel managed to rise a place to second and has now amassed $28.9m (£17.9m), the tenth biggest grosser at the UK box office this year, after recording its fourth consecutive £1m+ weekend – a feat matched by The Smurfs as it held firm in fourth spot.

The week’s highest new entry belonged to Reliance’s Bodyguard as previews bolstered its opening to a superb $1.4m (£839,695) from just 51 locations to land fifth. This meant that the romantic comedy, a Hindi-language remake of director Siddique’s own 2010 Malayalam-language film of the same name, notched both this week’s highest location average at a whopping $26,552 (£16,465) and the biggest opening for a Bollywood film at the UK box office this year to date.

A pair of horrors didn’t fare quite so well on their opening weekends: Disney’s remake Fright Night lacked bite as it managed only a miserly $1.1m (£680,543), 93.6% of which came from 3D screens, to chart seventh; while Entertainment’s Apollo 18 fared worse, managing $791,398 (£490,746) from its 358 locations to open a spot lower in eighth.

The former’s performance, coupled with sub-par openings for both Final Destination 5 and Conan The Barbarian last week (the latter of which dropped a huge 86% in its second weekend), suggests that when it comes to adult-orientated films, 3D isn’t the guaranteed money spinner that it’s proved to be over the summer with the likes of Harry Potter and Pirates 4.

Opening just outside the top 15 (when taking The Guard’s combined UK and Ireland figures into account) but each enjoying a more-than-respectable UK box office bow were Ayngaran’s Mankatha and Eros’ Bol managing averages of $11,126 (£6,899) and $6,838 (£4,240) respectively on their way to chart 16th and 17th.

Critical acclaim and festival buzz wasn’t enough for StudioCanal’s Kill List to record a big opening with Ben Wheatley’s horror only taking $141,864 (£87,970) from its 47 locations in 18th, almost half of which ($63,972 / £39,669) came from its 13 West End locations.

At least it didn’t do as poorly as Fox’s The Art Of Getting By which scraped into the top 20 after a woeful $121,971 (£75,634) marked the distributor’s worst opening of 2011 to date.

This week sees saturated releases for Entertainment’s Colombiana, Universal’s Jane Eyre and Sony’s Friends With Benefits. Norwegian hit Troll Hunter receives a wide release through Momentum.