Weekend Box Office (02/27/11): Hall Pass edges out Gnomeo and Juliet while Drive Angry crashes.

Hall Pass opened with a modest $13.5 million on its debut weekend, giving the Farrelly Brothers their first chart-topper since Me, Myself, and Irene back in June of 2000. The critically-mixed comedy starring Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate, and Richard Jenkins was their sixth-largest debut, coming in just at the $13.5 million (fourth-place) opening of There's Something About Mary back in July of 1998. The picture was heralded as a return to form for the once-kings of their genre who had seen their audience move on to the likes of Will Farrell and Judd Apatow. Alas, it was not quite to be. The Farrelly Brothers were the arguable kings of comedy in the mid-to-late 1990s, with crowd-pleasing smashes like Dumb and Dumber ($116 million) and There's Something About Mary, which spent months in the top ten and actually topped the box office in its eighth week of release. The latter ended up with $175 million, a huge number for a comedy, let alone an R-rated one. It's still the twelve biggest-grossing R-rated film of all time, and the fifth-biggest R-rated comedy ever.