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"It&amp;#39;s July Fourth weekend, and we&amp;#39;re all busy plotting our typical Fourth of July weekend stuff: beach trips, the One Hot Dog We Eat Annually, and seeing the must-watch blockbuster of the most important movie weekend of the year. Years ago, it was a weekend that always belonged to Will Smith. Today, it is a weekend that belongs to Melissa McCarthy.\nPinterestFacebookIn the late &amp;#39;90s and early &amp;#39;00s, studios greedily hoarded their Smith flicks for this little stretch of summer&amp;#8212;Independence Day, Men in Black, Wild Wild West, Men in Black II, I, Robot, and Hancock all bowed on the July Fourth weekend. A good &amp;quot;aw, hell no,&amp;quot; it turns out, is right up there with apple pie when it comes to American staples.\nNow, Hollywood is building a similar mini trend for McCarthy, whose profile has perhaps increased faster and more exponentially than any other actor&amp;#39;s over the past few years. Last year, The Heat, starring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, came out June 28&amp;#8212;and spent the July Fourth weekend beating big-action options like Man of Steel, World War Z, and White House Down. The only grown-up movie it didn&amp;#39;t best that weekend was The Lone Ranger&amp;#8212;but The Heat&amp;#39;s eventual domestic gross, $160 million, swamped Johnny Depp&amp;#39;s $89 million total.\nPinterestFacebookOne year later, the Bridesmaids breakout is officially the star Hollywood is betting its biggest weekend on. Tammy, a road-trip comedy that costars Susan Sarandon as McCarthy&amp;#39;s slightly slutty grandma, opens today alongside the kids&amp;#39; movie Earth to Echo and the horror film Deliver Us from Evil (read: no competition). Tammy&amp;#39;s major contest will be against the latest Transformers. And even that arrangement&amp;#8212;a comedy in which McCarthy robs a chicken joint with a greasy paper bag over her hand, seriously versus a $210 million budget robot/Mark Wahlberg bonanza&amp;#8212;feels like a major victory for female-driven comedies, and simply good comedies, which are rarer and rarer. (Tammy, BTW, is a far more complex movie than the trailers make it out to be, and I&amp;#39;ll be interested to hear what you guys think of it.)\nAfter Tammy, McCarthy&amp;#39;s next splashy leading role is in Spy, in which she plays a secret agent. Her supporting cast includes the kind of men Hollywood usually hangs major features on, like Jason Statham and Jude Law. The film is tentatively slated to be released in late May 2015&amp;#8212;but if Tammy blows up this weekend, look for it to slide back to become McCarthy&amp;#39;s third July Fourth entry in a row. And for one of her delicious bits of improvised obscenity to become America&amp;#39;s new &amp;quot;aw, hell no.&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/melissa-mccarthy-tammy>