2 Guns director gives Wahlberg and Washington a load of bull

It's been a good weekend for the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur as his new action thriller '2 Guns' starring Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington performs well at the US box office.

The new film has topped the Friday box office with $10 million on its way to a $28 million debut, easily enough to win the box office race in North America. This is close to the expected $30 million that the producers hoped to achieve, considering the teaming of two massive screen stars.

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The R-rated movie also took $1.3 million from late-night Thursday showings, making it a very respectable debut for a film budgeted at around $60 million.

Director Kormakur has also been speaking to 'The Hollywood Reporter' about the way in which he stamps his authority on such a big budget film. Talking about how most European directors are brought on board by studios as merely malleable assets that will do exactly as they're told, Baltasar revealed how he's sidestepped the usual process by initially working on a remake of one of his own films

Having produced and starred in the Icelandic version Universal’s 2012 Wahlberg vehicle 'Contraband',  he owned the underlying material.

“I had a bit more control,” he explains. “I wasn’t interested in just becoming a hired hand.”

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And as if to make his point, in '2 Guns' he managed to beat objections of both studio and stars to film a scene where he hangs stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg upside down by their feet and unleashes a raging bull on them.

“It wasn’t written that way in the script, so I kind of had to convince them to do this,” he recalls. “It wasn’t easy, but they went along with it. It turned out to be a fun day, at least for me.”

Meanwhile in other US box office news, it looks as if 'Smurfs 2' may be tanking Stateside, having only earned $17.5 million for the three-day weekend (a five-day opening of $27 million), less than hoped for and putting it at No. 3 behind '2 Guns' and 'The Wolverine.'

The Smurfs may be suffering from a current glut of family product, coming after 'Despicable Me 2' and Fox-DreamWorks Animation’s 'Turbo' but it's not all bad news. The film is expected to make at least 75% of its profits in overseas markets.

'2Guns' is released in the UK on August 16th