Record in sight for Land of Shtis

by Fabien Lemercier

03/04/2008 - Dany Boon’s comedy Welcome to the Land of Shtis [trailer] is now almost certain to earn the title of best-performing domestic film of all time.

Having reached 16.7m admissions after five weeks on release, the film is now only 570,000 admissions short of the 17.27m viewers drawn by Gérard Oury’s Don’t Look Now – We’re Being Shot At (1968).

Already nearing €100m at the box office , the film, which attracted a further 1.38m fans in its fifth week on 906 screens (Pathé Distribution), has for the first time seen a drop in admissions (-49% compared to the previous week), but still has by far the best per screen average. The feature – which stars the director and Kad Merad - is nonetheless unlikely to outstrip the biggest hit in French box-office history: Titanic with 20.64m admissions in 1997.

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Trailing behind the Shtis phenomenon, European co-productions performed well in the weekly box-office charts. In second place is the French/Luxembourg/German animated co-production Dragon Hunters by directorial duo Guillaume Ivenel and Arthur Qwak (Bac Films - 406 screens), which garnered 215,000 admissions in its first week.

Next in line is Philippe Claudel’s French/German co-production I’ve Loved You So Long (UGC Distribution – 266 screens), which has amassed 486,000 admissions in two weeks.

This is closely followed by Alex de la Iglesia’s Spanish/UK/French co-production The Oxford Murders [trailer, film focus] (see Focus, distribution La Fabrique de Films - 193 screens), which attracted 143,000 viewers in its first week.

The weekly top five closes with the entirely French-produced noir thriller MR 73 [trailer] by Olivier Marchal, which has garnered 795,000 admissions in the three weeks since its release (distribution Gaumont - 472 screens).

Jean-Paul Salomé’s Female Agents [trailer] (TFM Distribution – 412 screens) has drawn 775,000 viewers in four weeks and Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage [trailer] has amassed 216,000 admissions after four weeks of exhibition (Wild Bunch Distribution – 79 screens).

Finally, Samuel Benchetrit’s I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster [trailer] has achieved this week’s second highest per-print average (Mars Distribution - 76 screens) and clocks in at 80,000 admissions after its first week.

(Translated from French)