Fed: Australia notches up $7.78 million at box office to date
By Alyssa Braithwaite and Peter Mitchell01 Dec 2008 4:49 PM
SYDNEY, Dec 1 AAP - Aussies flocked to see Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia at the weekend, making it the number one film in the country.
Australia grossed $6.37 million at the box office on its opening weekend (Thursday to Sunday), bumping the latest James Bond movie Quantum of Solace to second place with $4.22 million.
Including its opening day and preview ticket sales, Australia has notched up $7.78 million to date, figures from Nielsen EDI show.
It is the most successful local film of 2008, easily beating the $2.3 million The Black Balloon pulled in during its entire cinema release.
But it failed to reach the $11.8 million benchmark set by Quantum of Solace in its first five days.
While Australians appear to have embraced the outback romance, the film failed to ignite much interest over a busy Thanksgiving long weekend in US and Canadian theatres.
Australia managed to scrape into fifth place at the North American box office, with $US20 million ($A30.4 million) in earnings.
Audiences instead filled cinemas showing the Reese Witherspoon-Vince Vaughn comedy, Four Holidays, which took $US46.7 million ($A71 million) from Wednesday to Sunday, easily claiming first place.
Four Holidays, with Witherspoon and Vaughn playing a yuppie couple forced to spend Christmas with their four divorced parents, opens in Australian theatres on Thursday.
The uninspiring US opening for Australia will likely damage the Oscar prospects for Kidman, Jackman and director-producer-screenwriter Luhrmann.
It has also left industry analysts wondering if the Hollywood studio backing the film, Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox, will make money on its huge, four-year investment.
The studio will be hoping the film performs strongly in Europe and Asia.
The epic opens in most European countries on Christmas Day, and in Japan in February.
"Given the cost of the massive production - the studio kicked in $US78 million ($A118.6 million) of the $US130 million ($A197.6 million) budget - the Baz Luhrmann-directed film will need strong legs and spectacular international grosses in order to break even," Hollywood box office analyst Gitesh Pandya, of boxofficeguru.com, wrote in his weekly report.
