Plentiful Pirate Bounty During Mid-Week Bow
Disney's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL struck box office gold in its first two days of release, bringing in $13.5M on July 9, 2003 and $10.4M on July 10. That's good news for the summer season, which needed a boost, and especially good for Disney, which now appears to have the one-two punch it desperately needed in FINDING NEMO ($282.6M) and PIRATES. The fact that PIRATES opened so well during a non-holiday period also bodes well for the swashbuckler.
In terms of competition, Fox's THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, the Sean Connery-starrer based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, opened July 11, but to very mixed reviews. The legion of Victorian superheroes is assisted by a legion of VFX services supplied by Industrial Light & Magic, Steve Johnson's Edge FX Inc., Double Negative, Cinesite (Europe), New Deal Studios Inc., Tippett Studio, Computercafe Inc., Pixel Magic, VCE.Com/Peter Kuran, R!OT, Giant Killer Robots, Engine Room, Big Red Pixel, Mar Vista Ventures and Millennium FX Ltd.