18/08/2006

With over 16m admissions and an average 3.7m cinemagoers per week, July was the busiest cinema-going month of the year thanks mostly to the number one title Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which grossed an impressive £39.9m.

Two UK co-productions were also in the Top 10 July box office: teenage action/adventure film Stormbreaker [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Geoffrey Sax took sixth position with a £3.3m gross and – surprisingly – Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ken Loach
interview: Rebecca O’Brien
film profile] ranked number eight with over £1.3m grossed.

Those two titles were still in the Top 15 box office last weekend, with Stormbreaker giving Entertainment Film Distributors an extra £278,545 from 323 screens for a total gross of over £5.3m, whileThe Wind…, released by Pathe two months ago, continues to blow all records with a total £3.1m from 77 screens.

Paul Greengrass’ United 93 [+see also:
trailer
film profile], another European co-production that sharply tackles a tough subject matter, is also holding well at the box office after an 11-week run. The UIP film about the last of the four hijacked aircrafts that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 grossed £4,456 from 8 screens last weekend and has now passed the £2.7m mark.

Five new films are opening in the UK today, including the French/Iranian co-production Stray Dogs by Marzieh Meshkini, a post-Taliban Afghani drama produced by Maysan Makhmalbaf. The film is being released by Artificial Eye in the Renoir and Curzon Soho London cinemas as well as in selected key UK cities.