The long awaited and keenly anticipated James Bond film “No Time to Die” dominated the U.K. and Ireland box office with an opening weekend collection of £25.9 million ($35.3 million), according to numbers from Comscore.
The Universal release, Daniel Craig’s swan song, benefited from near universal critical acclaim and looks set for a sustained run at the box office in the weeks to come. It opened ultra wide, across 772 locations in the U.K. alone, and surpassed the opening weekend collections of previous Bond outings “Skyfall” and “Spectre.”
After a stellar run at the top of the box office, Disney’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” collected £779,077 in second position. The film now has a cumulative total of £19.6 million after its fifth weekend.
Another Disney release, “Free Guy,” took £270,266 in third place and now has a total of £16.5 million in its eighth week of release.
In fourth place, Paramount’s “PAW Patrol: The Movie” collected £251,511 for a total of £8.1 million in its eighth week of release.
In the fifth position, Warner’s “The Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” took £237,150 in its second weekend and now has £1.5 million.
The lone new entry in the top 10 was Punjabi-language film “Chal Mera Putt 3,” which collected £192,957 in sixth place.
Given Bond’s box office hegemony, new releases for the upcoming weekend are limited. They include Chinese box office hit “Cloudy Mountain” from Trinity Cine Asia; 2020 Cannes selection, psychological thriller “John and the Hole” from Vertigo Releasing; “The Addams Family 2” from Universal; award-winning documentary “Pier Kids” from Other Parties Film Company; and India road trip documentary “Romantic Road” from Blue Dolphin Films.
