-
-
Related
Sci-fi action thriller District 9, about a colony of space aliens stranded in South Africa, landed atop the North American box office with an estimated $44 million its first weekend.
The faux documentary produced by Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, was buoyed by largely warm reviews and a promotional blitz at the recent Comic-Con comic book convention that fueled pre-release buzz.
The film was directed and co-written by South African native Neill Blomkamp, a protege of Jackson making his feature directorial debut after a career of doing commercials. The movie cost roughly $55 million to make, a very modest budget by Hollywood standards.
The cast of unknowns stars South African newcomer Sharlto Copley as a bureaucrat leading the forced eviction of alien creatures from a Johannesburg slum, District 9, where they have been settled since their ship stalled over the city 20 years earlier, marooning them on Earth.
The confrontation escalates quickly into a bloody struggle by the humans to gain control over the sophisticated weaponry of the crustacean-like aliens. The story of extraterrestrials as unwanted immigrants was adapted from a short film, Alive in Joburg, that Copley had produced with Blomkamp as director.
Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution for Sony Pictures Entertainment, said the novel story line and setting of the film obviously caught on with the mostly male, young moviegoers who made up its initial core audience.
"It's so out-of-the-box different from most movies that you see from a major studio," Bruer said. "It's kind of a rogue, raw, visceral film that has a life of its own."
