LONDON — Having already taken the comedy record for an opening night here with $4.6 million Wednesday, The Inbetweeners 2 went a step further and laid claim to the U.K.’s best opening weekend for the year, racing to the top of the box office.
Grossing more than $21 million, the British film snatched 2014’s opening weekend title from Transformers: Age of Extinction but appeared to have fallen slightly short of 2011’s first The Inbetweeners Movie, which took $22 million and became the U.K.’s all-time biggest opening weekend for a live-action comedy.
Based on a high-school sitcom that lasted for three seasons on U.K. broadcaster Channel 4’s youth-oriented Freeview channel E4, The Inbetweeners movies have transplanted its main characters Will, Simon, Jay and Neil overseas as part of their continued and largely unfulfilled quest to meet girls. The first film saw the quartet head to Greece, while the latest goes farther afield with a trip to Australia.
The combination of lewd sex gags and teenage failures has gone down a storm with U.K. audiences, and the financial success of the second installment is likely to see pressure build for a third.
Speaking to local newspaper Metro, James Buckley, who plays Jay, said that he would be keen for a follow-up should the story be right. “It’s very much up to the writers [Damon Beesley and Iain Morris]. They won’t come up with a better idea than this one, but if they did I’d be up for it,” he said.
