Here are the facts: the Adam Sandler gay-sham com I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry won the weekend box office derby, pulling in about $35 million to Harry Potter and The What Kind Of Magical Scrape Have These Spooky Kids Conjured Up Now?!?’s $32 million. $35 million is a significant opening take, and it would not have been possible to rack up if Sandler’s base audience had been turned off by the pic’s pro-gay tolerance theme. Not only was the gay marriage thing not a problem–it might have been a plus. Just look at the numbers: Adam Sandler fans are more likely to rush out opening weekend see their guy pretend to pretend to be gay, than watch him in a serious film about post-9/11 ennui…by a factor of seven.

And now, here’s the spin: Jeff Wells, LAist and the New York Times think Mr. Potter’s 58% weekend-to-weekend decline may have been the result of Harry Potter overload. LAist has the better quip: “My guess is that the release of Deathly Hallows cost Order of the Phoenix a second consecutive weekend crown (I still can’t believe that Voldermort turned out to be Harry’s father!).” I honestly can’t tell if Nikki Finke is being sarcastic when she writes, “There’d been speculation whether the new Harry Potter book would cut into the franchise’s movie ticket sales. Nah!” I can tell you that she definitely loses points for using the term “fivequel.”

Meanwhile, Box Office Mojo couldn’t really care less about gay marriage vs. boy wizardry–for these datamasters, it’s all about Hairspray. Brandon Gray devotes the opening four paragraphs of a 7-graph writeup to the musical, which broke records for its genre. Gray notes that even adjusting for inflation, Hairspray’s $28 million opening easily beat the record for the best musical opening weekend ever previously held by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And it’s not just good news for song-and-dance lovers–New Line needed this hit. “It marks New Line’s first $20 million-plus launch since Wedding Crashers two years ago and breaks the distributor’s losing streak that had persisted since Final Destination 3 in February 2006.”

More spin:

Transformers is still doing okay — Comics2Film
A victory for homophobia? — Lou Lemenick
…or one for Jessica Biel’s butt? –Obsessed with Film