UIP's Meet The Parents began its international roll-out by shooting straight to the top of the German box office chart, with a four-day gross of $2.51m (DM5.54m) from 356 screens. The film's healthy opening screen average of $7,064 is the third highest of the year in Germany behind Mission: Impossible 2 ($8,804) and American Pie ($8,655), although both films opened on more screens (893 and 615 respectively).

Meet The Parents, which stars Ben Stiller as a male nurse spending a disastrous weekend with his girlfriend's parents, also opened in Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, and is set to roll out to several other European territories, including the UK, next weekend.

The Jay Roach comedy pushed Columbia TriStar's Charlie's Angels, now in its second week, into second place in the German chart with a gross of $2.18m (DM4.81m) from 790 screens. UIP's The Grinch came in third with $1.33m (DM2.93m) from 588 screens. The Jim Carrey-starrer has taken only $5.99m (DM13.19m) after three weeks in Germany, compared to a $9.4m haul after only two weeks in the UK.

Elsewhere in the German chart, Constantin's locally-produced Schule, directed by the 25-year-old film student Marco Petry, clocked up a respectable $860,099 (DM1,893,937) from 337 screens for the number five spot. The film is Constantin's third successful teen comedy this year following Harte Jungs and Erkan & Stefan which racked up 3 million admissions between them. The genre has helped to push Constantin's market share for the year to November 26 to 15.2%, making it the top indie and the second strongest distributor overall behind UIP, which has a 21.6% market share.