Academy Award victor Ron Howard returns to direct the latest bestseller in Dan Brown’s billion-dollar Robert Langdon series, Inferno. The Da Vinci Code opened in 3,757 theaters back in May 2006 with an impressive opening weekend tally of $77 million.
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Reuters reported that Lionsgate’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, which held onto the top spot for a second straight week, drawing an estimated $16.7 million.
What Else Happened? Some countries also got Doctor Strange before we did, and they seem to be enjoying it: The film earned $86 million overseas this weekend, the best worldwide opening of the fall.
In the weekend box office “Madea” vs “Inferno” battle, the former is the clear victor considering the fewer number of theaters it was shown. Hanks himself has been riding a wave of good will, starting with his September hit “Sully” and culminating last weekend in his triumphant return to “Saturday Night Live”, giving the show its highest-rated episode of the season so far and generating at least three Hanks sketches that went viral. After a failed attempt on his life, Langdon teams up with his doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), to unravel a deadly plot to drastically reduce the Earth’s population to a more manageable size.
It’s also peak Dan Brown, a film with a too-familiar structure that only empowers it whereas it would threaten other franchises.
I have not read Dan Brown’s book, so I can not say how many of this film’s failings come from the source material and how many come from director Ron Howard and screenwriter David Koepp.
Boo! A Madea Halloween was the number-one movie the weekend it was released, baffling Hollywood once again and making the Hotep crowd pissed that a movie starring a black guy in a dress made more money than alleged rapist Nate Parker’s still-struggling The Birth of a Nation. “Angels & Demons” was his last major studio movie to turn a profit.
Sony executives said they always expected “Inferno” to be more of a foreign play than a domestic bet, noting that previous Langdon adventures pulled in more than 70 percent of their box office from foreign markets. The film has earned roughly $150 million overseas. In the first two films, we saw Langdon as more an authoritative figure who was one step ahead of everyone else. Even more impressive is the fact that “Inferno” was playing in 3,575 US theatres, while “A Madea Halloween” was only in 2,299. The movie, released by Viacom’s (NASDAQ: VIA) (NASDAQ: VIAB) Paramount studio, reaped gross ticket sales of almost $10 million.
“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”, $9.6 million ($11.6 million international).
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Elsewhere on the chart, the Indian romance Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, featuring some of the country’s biggest stars, including Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Ranbir Kapoor, makes a solid debut at No. 10 on the North American chart, pulling in an estimated $2.1 million from 302 screens for a per-screen average of $7,070.
