World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Spider-Man helps a soaring UK box office, China plates up a chef in a warzone, Scandi cinema celebrates success and Dhurandhar 2 rewrites record books in India.
Right then — grab a cuppa, because there’s rather a lot to get through today, and I don’t just mean the fact that I’ve apparently developed some sort of Pavlovian response to the words “Spider-Man” and “box office record” appearing in the same sentence. It’s a genuinely global week for film news, so let’s hop on the flight deck and do a full circuit: the UK, Hollywood, China, the Middle East, Bollywood and Scandinavia all have something to say today.
The UK is busting records other than for heat and drought: The UK box office has just enjoyed its strongest weekend of the year, with the top fifteen films hauling in £46.3 million — a genuinely startling 61% jump on the already impressive figures for the year. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (twitch) is still setting the pace at the top of the yearly chart with over £65 million banked, though it took a big tumble this weekend, dropping a hefty 67%. Meanwhile Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is proving the far steadier hand, with the smallest drop of the frame at just 23% and a widest-ever UK release of 751 screens to its name.
Hollywood’s Chinese detour: The big Hollywood-adjacent story this week is happening in China, where Once Upon a Time in the Middle East opened nationwide today. Directed by Wen Muye (Dying to Survive) and starring the hugely popular comic actor Shen Teng, it follows a debt-ridden Chinese chef who opens a restaurant in a Middle Eastern city, only for war to break out around him and his customers — a premise that’s being read by several commentators as a deliberate, distinctly un-American way of telling a Middle East story. The hero here isn’t a soldier or a spy: he’s a bloke trying to keep the lights on and feed the neighbourhood kids. Sounds great. It’s arriving off the back of a booming Chinese summer season, with the market having already crossed 20 billion yuan (about $2.95 billion) year to date, and it’ll be jostling for attention against holdovers like the animated hit All Wishes Come True! and, yes, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is still doing brisk business there too.
The Middle East, taking the lead role for once: That release feels like a fitting bridge into the Middle East itself. Saudi Arabia’s cinema market — still only eight years old, after a 35-year ban — has been posting Arabic-language market shares that would have seemed fanciful even a couple of years back, with local and Egyptian titles between them regularly out-drawing the Hollywood imports at multiplexes. Egypt’s own industry, meanwhile, is having a record-breaking year on its home turf, with local hits setting first-week benchmarks that keep getting broken within months of being set. It’s a proper regional cinema boom, and one I suspect a lot of UK readers haven’t clocked yet. Worth me watching out for Egyptian/Saudi content at the upcoming London Film Festival.
Bollywood’s billion-rupee problem (a nice one to have): Over in India, Dhurandhar 2 continues to rewrite the record books, having become the first Hindi film to cross ₹1,000 crore net ($105K) domestically and now sitting as the second-highest grosser in Indian cinema history. Not “big potatoes”, as Black Widow might say, in terms of global numbers but a big deal for the Indian market. On the release front, the ensemble action-comedy Welcome to the Jungle, packed with a long cast list of Indian stars (Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Jackie Shroff and around a dozen others), has secured wide distribution across North America, the Middle East and right here in the UK too, underlining just how central British-Indian audiences have become to Bollywood’s overseas release strategy.
Scandi cool, Cannes glow: And finally, over in Scandinavia, the afterglow of this year’s Cannes is still very much being felt: Fjord, the Norwegian-shot drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan that took the Palme d’Or, is now making its way around the festival circuit, including a slot at the Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival. Attention’s now turning to the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund, where the Nordic Council Film Prize nominees are due to be announced on 24 August — always a useful shortlist if you fancy sounding cultured at your next dinner party and want to drop a Scandi title nobody else has heard of yet. This one will surely make the LFF list?
Right, that’s your lot for today — after finding what’s at the End of Oak Street last night, I will hopefully find what the Ice Cream Man has to sell later today. Until next time.
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