With the power of good word of mouth and hot Hollywood buzz, Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” won over the Us box office this weekend, despite banning non-humans from screenings. Bested all of new releases and especially last weekend champion “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”, the badass science fiction grossed an impressive $37,3 million from 3,049 theaters which means it earned its entire $30 million budget back and then some in one, single, weekend. The success of “District 9″ was mostly helped by its clever marketing campaign which played the theme of prejudice against alien from posters instructing citizens to report non-humans to ads on bus benches stating that the seats are for humans only. “Everybody was like, ‘What is this?’ There was a big question mark in people’s minds,” Sony’s head of distribution Rory Bruer shared. “It did really pique their interest and drove them to the Internet and elsewhere to discover what’s going on.” The film was buoyed by rave reviews and a promotional blitz at the recent Comic-Con comic book convention, which fueled strong pre-release interest among sci-fi fans. The studio also touted the fact the movie, shot in a faux documentary style, and was produced by Peter Jackson, the filmmaker behind the blockbuster, Oscar-winning “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Bruer added that the story line and setting of “District 9” 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.”
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