By Ryan Parsons | Image property of Columbia Pictures.
Casino Royale
Bond may be having some small difficulties with animated penguins domestically, Casino Royale continues to score in the international market. With an offshore take of $128.2 million, the film's worldwide gross has already broken the $200 million mark and doesn't look to quit anytime soon.
International Box Office for Casino Royale
Casino Royale and Happy Feet again showed their strength over the Thanksgiving weekend. Though Bond continues to come in second, Columbia Pictures is beginning to take into account the worldwide ticket sales. One can't really blame them, since the film's international box office is nearly as big as the domestic.
With $222.4 million worldwide, Casino Royale is on track to become the largest Bond film to date. The record was set by Brosnan in Die Another Day four years back with a total take of $431 million. If you have any mathematic ability, you can see that just after two weekends, this twenty-first Bond installment is already over half way there.
With nothing huge to stand in Casino's way the next couple of weeks, expect this record to be broken by New Year's Eve.
To make the competitors feel even worse, Casino Royale took in more than double the combined grosses of the next four pics -- Borat, The Departed, Saw III and Open Season. Not too much of a surprise there, considering each of these films had already hat their spotlight weeks before. Seriously, I thought a couple of these had already left theatres.
Casino Royale's international box office take is not only good news for Columbia Pictures, but for Hollywood in general. After falling $.6 billion short of 2004's international box office record of $8.5 billion in 2005, 2006 now looks to on track to beat this number.
OK, OK, Columbia Pictures does have reason to be thrilled. Thanks to Daniel Craig and Casino Royale, Sony has posted its best year ever in overseas box office with $1.39 billion, already surpassing the 2002 mark of $1.31 billion.
Add to Heffee!
