Christophe Gans' latest film gets off to an exceptional start in Italy.
Released February 27, 2014, the film rose to top position at the local box office, with 385,000 admissions during its opening week. It outranks Una donna per amica (Warner Bros.), an Italian film starring Laetitia Casta, which released the same week.
Christophe Gans' film is the second French feature to lead the Italian box office since the beginning of 2014, a rare event for films that aren't American or Italian. Last month, Belle and Sébastien attracted 403,000 spectators during its opening week, and currently registers more than 1.1 million admissions. These two films, distributed by Notorious, represent the best opening week results of majority French films since the beginning of 2000. The previous record was held by The Intouchables (Medusa), which in 2012 accumulated 366,000 admissions the week it launched, and went on to register 2.5 million admissions by the end of its career, putting it in 4th position at the Italian box office that year.
The remarkable performances of Beauty and the Beast and Belle and Sébastien in Italian theaters proves the healthy state of French cinema in this territory, which represented the fourth highest admissions rate for French films throughout the world in 2012, with more than 7 million spectators, being 7.7% of the market share for French films.
