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20th Century Fox (NYSE: FOX, initial buy $11.69) couldn’t have written a better script for how they would release their new sci-fi adventure movie The Martian, if they had tried. NASA’s recent real life announcement that they had found signs of flowing water on the surface of Mars at some stage in the past has created a major buzz on social media networks and renewed interest in space exploration.
The buzz and some major star power helped blast The Martian to an opening weekend take of $54.3 million in the North American market last weekend. That easily topped the movie tables for the weekend and ranks the movie as the second biggest opening in the US in the month of October, coincidentally coming in just behind another space movie – Gravity.
The Martian has been getting a thumb up from both the critics and audiences. Opinion aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes ranks it as scoring a ‘fresh’ 93% on its ‘Tomatometer’ from critics and 94% of its audiences also liking the movie.
The Martian is a Ridley Scott helmed movie and the director of course has plenty of experience with sci-fi, having directed the classic Alien and Blade Runner just to mention a couple. It stars Matt Damon as an astronaut who gets left behind on a Mars mission and is adapted from a novel of the same name first self-published by Andy Weir in 2011.
We won’t give too much away, but the movie has been described as a “Cast Away” set in space and judging from the trailer and what has been written about it in the press to date is a bit more upbeat than some of Ridley Scott’s other features. A great cast supports Matt Damon in the movie, including Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor to name just some.
The $54.3 million domestic opening weekend take for The Martian ranks as the second biggest opener for Ridley Scott’s Hannibal. And interestingly it also ranks as Matt Damon’s second best premiere, behind only The Bourne Legacy with a $69.3 million domestic opener. In terms of competition, The Martian come in far ahead of Sony’s (NYSE; SNE, initial buy $13.64) Hotel Transylvania 2, which after its second weekend in cinemas had a strong $94 million domestic sales and another $59.8 million in international box office receipts.
Sony will be pleased with how the animated feature Transylvania is tracking, as year to date the studio hasn’t fared well. Of course the best and biggest is yet to come with the latest James Bond chapter Spectre set to debut in November.
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