The Internship, the comedy featuring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as fortysomething interns at Google, came in at No. 4 in the box office this weekend, marking an underwhelming launch.
The film earned $18.1 million over the weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. That puts it behind Ethan Hawke sci-fi thriller The Purge, which placed at No. 1 with $36.4 million, and Fast & Furious 6 and Now You See Me, with $19.8 million and $19.5 million, respectively. The Internship opening also paled in comparison to Wilson and Vaughn's last big film, The Wedding Crashers, which brought in $33.9 million in its opening weekend in 2005.
Reviews for the movie have also been disappointing. The Internship received a 33% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Many reviews took issue with Google's involvement in the film. The New York Times called the film a "two-hour commercial for GoogleWorld masquerading as an aspirational buddy comedy," while RogerEbert.com said the film "[glorifies] Google as both a successful company and a mystical entity that makes the world a better place. This sentiment is treated without irony."
Google allowed a great deal of access to The Internships's filmmakers. During Google I/O, CEO Larry Page explained that the company's involvement with the film aimed to make engineers into heroes. "They were making a movie we decided we'd get involved," he said, explaining that computer science has an image problem in which techies are seen as "nerdy curmudgeons." However, in The Internship, a tech-savvy Google employee character is "by far the coolest character in the movie."