Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated return to the sci-fi genre this year with Prometheus is set to take the summer box office by storm.
Released at the start of June – going head-to-head with Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman – Scott’s film has already been breaking records* a month in advance, with ticket pre-sales at the BFI IMAX in London surging to almost 0,000.
“Visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott returns to the genre he helped define, creating an original science fiction epic set in the most dangerous corners of the universe. The film takes a team of scientists and explorers on a thrilling journey that will test their physical and mental limits and strand them on a distant world, where they will discover the answers to our most profound questions and to life’s ultimate mystery.”
Co-written by Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts, the film stars Logan Marshall-Green, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, and Patrick Wilson – essentially, the cast is amazing – and has already sold more than eighteen thousand tickets at time of writing, taking £293,312 ($474,687). And we’ve still got four weeks until its release, so that number will only be going in one direction!
Tickets are on sale now via the BFI’s official website, and there are still plenty of seats available throughout its three-week run there, from 1st to 21st June, kicking things off with a midnight screening at 00:01 in the wee hours of that first Friday morning. The first day alone has also taken a record-breaking £137,000 ($221,717) so far in pre-sales, completely selling out the two evening showings.
The figures are even better than other films that have played at the BFI IMAX, including The Dark Knight, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, and Avatar, and I have a feeling that the only things that might be beating it this year will be The Dark Knight Rises as the first instalment of The Hobbit. Time will tell.
In all honesty, I had my money on Snow White and the Huntsman taking the number one spot in the first weekend of June, but it looks like I could definitely be wrong about that.
Prometheus will be released on 1st June in the UK, and 8th June in the US, and you can catch all our coverage of the film so far by clicking here.
*It’s worth remembering that Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (released as ‘Avengers Assemble’ here) didn’t play at the BFI IMAX because it’s distributed as a digital 3D film, rather than a print. It certainly would have been interesting to see the figures it could have taken if it had been playing in London.
Source: THR.
