The plane, piloted by Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Hanks) and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), was met with disaster minutes after taking off from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009, when a flock of Canadian geese disabled both engines. Sully also marks the first movie to be show nearly entirely with IMAX cameras.
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Directed by Clint Eastwood, “Sully” handily outperformed recent expectations, which had been in the $25 million range.
The home invasion thriller, which has an impressive 83 per cent fresh rating from critics on the review aggregate website, has now made just shy of $69 million at the domestic box office.
Tom Hanks stars as Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed his plane in the Hudson River, saving the lives of 155 crew and passengers.
Sony-Screen Gems drama “When the Bough Breaks” opened respectably in second with $15 million at 2,246 sites. With Tom Hanks in the lead role, Sully, the story of the 2009 “Landing on the Hudson”, brought in the crowds with an estimated $35.5 million – though – though it has a $60 million budget to cover. The Light Between Oceans, starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, tumbled 62 percent in its second weekend to $1.8 million for a $9.4 million cume. Supervillain blockbuster Suicide Squad made $5.7 million – good enough for fourth and bringing it to $307.4 million to date domestically – and The Wild Life rounded out the top five. This marks the largest September debut for a Warner Bros. film, as well as the largest post-Labor Day opening, according to the studio. The new animated film featuring the voices of Matthias Schweighofer, Aylin Tezel and Ilka Bessin manages to earn approximately $3.4 million in its first week, despite scathing reviews (15% on Rotten Tomatoes).
“Don’t Breathe” was in the third place, with an estimated 8.2 million dollars in ticket sales this weekend and 66.8 million dollars over three weeks of showings. In January 2008, Eastwood’s box-office hit Gran Torino grossed $29.5 million when expanding nationwide.
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The Warner Bros. drama collected an estimated $35.5 million in the USA and Canada, ComScore Inc. said Sunday in a statement.
