After taking the film to the Toronto International Film Festival, the filmmakers and cast of Fred Schepisi’s The Eye of the Storm have had a good weekend at the Australia box office.
Making its way into the top 10 on just 18 screens, the film earned $196,250 for a screen average of $10,903. Technically, this makes it the highest opening weekend screen average for any Australian film this year.
To put this into perspective, the other record-holding film for the year is Kriv Stenders’ Red Dog, which nuzzled its way into the biggest opening weekend of the year for an Australian film, with a $1.8 million juicy bone to chew on across 244 cinemas last month.
“To achieve the highest screen average in such a stellar year for local films is very special. It is also gratifying to see the film embraced so warmly at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was sold out for all screenings,” said Richard Payten, Managing Director, Transmission Films.
The Eye of the Storm is set in the exclusive Sydney suburbs around Centennial Park in the 1970s, where the two children of dying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling, Melancholia) return home. As expatriate son Basil (Geoffrey Rush, Green Lantern) and daughter Dorothy (Judy Davis, Marie Antoinette) await her impending death, she continues to exert a powerful influence over them both, and the nurses that attend her.
Director Fred Schepisi returns to Australia for the first time since 1988’s Evil Angels (aka A Cry in the Dark), adapting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White’s tome of the same name.
The Eye of the Storm was released in Australia on 15 September 2011from Transmission/Paramount.
