Da Vinci Code tops box office
2006-05-22 07:36
Los Angeles - The Da Vinci Code scored $224m worldwide and topped the North American box office in its weekend debut, as the controversial film overcame bad reviews and calls for boycotts, early figures showed on Sunday.
The film, highly anticipated by fans of Dan Brown's bestselling novel and vigorously criticised by religious groups, raked in $77m in North America, according to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Director Ron Howard's $125m thriller, starring Tom Hanks, raked in an estimated $224m around the world, Exhibitor Relations said.
It was the fourth biggest worldwide opening, according to Daily Variety, the top Hollywood trade paper. Only Star Wars: Episode III, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and War of the Worlds did better.
The Sony Pictures film is already the greatest commercial success for Howard and Hanks, according to Exhibitor Relations. Hanks's previous biggest opening weekend was for Toy Story 2, which made $57.4m in its 1999 opening.
Memory of Christ 'insulted and mocked'
The film sparked calls for boycotts around the world by groups angry at the movie's story of a Vatican cover-up of Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene and the couple's daughter.
One group bought a full-page advertisement in the USA Today, a mass-circulation national newspaper, to denounce the film, while others urged followers to stage protests.
"Never in the history of filmmaking has the memory of our Lord Jesus Christ and the faith of all Christians been so explicitly targeted, insulted and mocked on such a worldwide scale," said Marc Balestrieri, president of De Fide, a non-profit religious group.
Movie a 'stodgy, grim thing'
Many film critics found that the film fell well short of expectations.
Daily Variety savaged the movie as a "stodgy, grim thing". The Washington Post described it as "about as thrilling as watching your parents do a Sudoku puzzle".
But experts had predicted that filmgoers would ignore the bad reviews and protests.
"There are so many people already familiar with the book, and eager to see the visual version of the book that they like," said ticket sales specialist Gitesh Pandya of the website Boxofficeguru.com.
"Overall I still think it will have a gigantic opening weekend all over the world, because there's so much media hype and curiosity all around the world," he said last week.
Other box office successes
Final box office figures are due on Monday.
In second place in the weekly rankings was Over The Hedge with ticket sales of $37.3m. Displaced from the top spot, Mission: Impossible III fell to third place with ticket receipts of $11m, followed in fourth spot by Poseidon, a remake of the 1972 shipwreck movie The Poseidon Adventure, with sales of $9.2m.