• Box Office

World Box Office, September 5 – 11

At 86 years old, Clint Eastwood is showing no signs of slowing down. For more than half a century now The Man with No Name of Sergio Leone’s iconic westerns has been a leading figure in the film industry. From the treacherous deserts of the Wild West to the mean streets of San Francisco where he laid down the law as detective “Dirty” Harry Callahan all the way to the director’s chair of classics and Golden Globe winners such as Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby to last year’s American Sniper, Clint’s career has been nothing but highs. This weekend’s box office champ Sully is no exception to his continuing success.  Tom Hanks, another American institution in his own right, stars as the man who landed US Airways flight 1549 safely on the Hudson River just outside of Manhattan in January 2009. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was a soft-spoken, hardworking fighter pilot and later a commercial airline captain who, on that cold North East afternoon, found himself guiding 155 souls along the narrow ridge between life and death. Just minutes after takeoff, Captain Sullenberger’s plane struck a large flock of Canadian geese. With his left engine out of commission and on fire, he made a gut decision to put the plane down in the middle of the river rather than trying to circle back to LaGuardia. All 155 passengers and crew members survived, but Sully finds himself in the crosshairs of the National Transportation Safety Board, and is forced to defend himself against accusations that the damage wasn’t so extensive that he couldn’t have made it back to either LaGuardia or nearby Teterboro airports.

Sully grossed $35.5 million at home for the largest post-Labor Day weekend take of all time. Four of those millions came from IMAX screens, earning another record for the best 2D large format debut of all time. A solid A Cinemascore and almost universally positive reviews all but guarantee that this film will stand on very sturdy legs in the coming weeks. Foreign numbers were encouraging as well. Sully picked up $9.5 million from 39 overseas markets including $2.3 million in Australia, and it marked the biggest opening ever for an Eastwood film in Russia. It opens in Japan in two weeks and will continue rolling out in Europe and Latin America over the coming months. There was other good news for Warner Bros. when Suicide Squad added $10 million internationally and is now close to a global gross of $700 million. Meanwhile in Korea the studio scored another hit with its local co-production Mil Jeong. The film tells the story of the resistance movement during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. It is directed by Kim Jee-woon and stars Snowpiercer’s Song Kang-ho. Mil Jeong took a spectacular $16 million in its home debut and marks a positive start to Warner’s foray into Korean language co-productions.

At the Chinese box office, Star Trek Beyond led the pack with a $12.1 million return frame. Its local cumulative now stands at $53.3 million. A very slow weekend in the Middle Kingdom saw Sony’s The Shallows take third with $8.2 million followed closely by Kevin Spacey’s cat comedy Nine Lives, which took $8.1 million in its Far East debut. In the meantime Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures’ The Secret Life of Pets added $15.1million out of 56 territories, for a worldwide gross close to $800 million. Three months after its release Finding Dory keeps finding new audiences and has grossed $950 million so far. And with major markets such as Germany and Italy still to open is due to cross the 1 billion mark soon.

See the latest box office numbers worldwide: