‘Inferno’ Fires Up $100M+ At International Box Office
Ahead of its domestic debut, the Sony threequel Inferno has crossed the $100M mark at the international box office. The cume since it rollout began less than two weeks ago is $100.28M. The thriller based on Dan Brown’s book debuted to $50M offshore in 53 markets earlier this month, making it the fall’s biggest launch so far at overseas turnstiles.
Reuniting the team of director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer and star Tom Hanks, Inferno has opened at No. 1 in 64 markets including Germany, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Italy. The latter was the film’s biggest bow on launch weekend, which followed the world premiere in Florence and location shooting there and in Venice.
Seven years after Angels & Demons, Hanks returns as symbology professor/puzzle solver Robert Langdon. He’s again surrounded by a U.S. and international cast that includes Ben Foster, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan and Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen. The story sees Langdon wake up in an Italian hospital with amnesia and team up with Dr. Sienna Brooks (Jones) as they race across Europe to stop a madman from unleashing a global virus that would wipe out half the world’s population.
Sony’s President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, Josh Greenstein, said of today’s milestone: “Tom Hanks has proven yet again that he is one of the world’s biggest stars, and Robert Langdon is one of his most iconic roles. Ron and Brian have delivered a film that hits the mark on everything that global audiences love about this series. This kind of international performance gives us strong momentum as we open domestically and continue to roll out in some of the most highly anticipated international markets this weekend.”
Inferno opens Friday in North America along with other key markets including China and Japan. On the first two Robert Langdon pictures, starting with 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, Japan has been a lead market. France bows November 9.
The third film in the franchise spawned by Brown’s novels has a production cost of $75M, which is half the budget of the first two pictures.
The first film in the series was so anticipated that a specially decked-out Eurostar was chartered to bring the cast to the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. It went on to gross $758M globally. Sequel Angels & Demons made $489M worldwide in 2009; that book kicked off Brown’s series in 2000. His novels are published in 56 languages around the world with more than 200M copies in print, and Inferno was a big bestseller set against Dante’s circles of hell.
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