Peter Jackson's framleiðsuverkefnið 'District 9' opnaði stórt í USA eða í 13 $ og er spá eins og ég spáði 34 $ dollara um helgina

FRIDAY PM/SATURDAY AM UPDATE: Sources are telling me Sony pick-up District 9 looks big, right now over $13M Friday from 3,049 theaters and the West Coast could push it higher. The studio has raised its lowball estimate of a high $20sM weekend to be more in line with rival studios at $34M. That's great considering it cost only $30M. Then again, producer Peter Jackson's name means so much to 18-49 aged moviegoers. Comic-Con geeks and movie critic old farts loved it. It's the #1 most tweeted topic Friday night. And Marc Weinstock's viral marketing campaign for a year bore no Sony/Tri-Star logo on purpose so it wouldn't have a big studio's PR machine feel. (As if the audience had organically discovered the pic themselves.) This was a Sony pickup for North America and the English-speaking world, and a number of international territories, for $25 million. Russia just opened the movie huge -- maybe $4M. 

Here's how it went down: District 9 director Neill Blomkamp was supposed to be Peter Jackson's helmer on Halo, which went down in flames. But Peter and his partner Fran Walsh kept Neill in New Zealand to develop his short film, Alive In Joburg. Jackson then turned it into a hard-cover faux graphic novel. That book went to Peter's longtime manager Ken Kamins to arrange financing and set it up as a film. Ken made the decision to go indie, and contacted his former colleague and current office space roomie Bill Block, who runs QED Intl (Oliver Stone's W) which was given first shot to finance foreign pre-sales. When the deal went down that November 2007 and hit Variety, Peter Schlessel at Sony was on the phone to Block two hours later asking for a meeting the next morning at AFM. So Peter looked at the graphic novel, then got on the phone with Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, who both insisted on a confab with Block that afternoon. Over at AFM, other studios kicked the tires but didn't buy. Finally Sony picked up the domestic (but through Tri-Star, not Columbia). The result is not just another Amy Pascal pic starring Adam or Will but, according to the 98% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, an imaginative, creative, cutting-edge pic made outside the studio system.

NF