SA aliens movie tops box office
2009-08-16 21:53
-
District 9
From producer Peter Jackson and director Neill Blomkamp comes a startlingly original science...
Now R53.95
buy now
Los Angeles - Sci-fi action thriller District 9, about a
colony of space aliens stranded in South Africa, landed atop the North
American box office with an estimated $37m its first weekend,
distributor Sony Pictures said on Sunday.
See photos from District 9
The faux documentary produced by Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind The Lord of the Rings
trilogy, was buoyed by largely warm reviews and a promotional blitz at
the recent Comic-Con comic book convention that fuelled pre-release
buzz.
The film was directed and co-written by South African
native Neill Blomkamp, a protege of Jackson making his feature
directorial debut after a career of doing commercials. The movie cost
roughly $30m to make, a very modest budget by Hollywood standards.
The cast of unknowns stars South African newcomer Sharlto Copley as a
bureaucrat leading the forced eviction of alien creatures from a
Johannesburg slum, District 9, where they have been settled since their
ship stalled over the city 20 years earlier, marooning them on Earth.
Adapted from a short film
The confrontation escalates quickly into a bloody struggle by the
humans to gain control over the sophisticated weaponry of the
crustacean-like aliens. The story of extraterrestrials as unwanted
immigrants was adapted from a short film, Alive in Joburg, that Copley had produced with Blomkamp as director.
Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution for Sony Pictures
Entertainment, said the novel story line and setting of the film
obviously caught on with the mostly male, young moviegoers who made up
its initial core audience.
"It's so out-of-the-box different
from most movies that you see from a major studio," Bruer said. "It's
kind of a rogue, raw, visceral film that has a life of its own."
Last week's No 1 film in the US and Canada, Paramount Pictures' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, fell to No 2 this weekend with a Friday-through-Sunday estimated gross of $22.5m.
Another film debuting in wide release this weekend, Warner Bros' romantic drama The Time Traveller's Wife, based on a best-selling novel, grossed $19.2m to open at No 3.