‘The Mummy’ Sets Single-Day Box Office Record In South Korea

While expecations for The Mummy‘s domestic box office returns look rather frightening with a projected stateside debut below $40M, it’s looking as though the same can’t be said of the movie’s expected performance overseas. The movie’s opening in South Korea is not only the biggest single-day total for a Universal movie, it’s also the biggest in the entire history of the country’s box office.

Deadline is reporting that The Mummy just made $6.6M on its opening day in South Korea, taking the title of biggest single-day debut over there from local hit Train to Busan. For frame of reference, that’s more than the three-day total that Wonder Woman got the weekend before, which we should note is by every indication a strong start. There are two big reasons for the movie’s opening Monday making so much money, with the first being that it’s a holiday. The second is that South Koreans love Tom Cruise movies – Edge of Tomorrow, which greatly underperformed in the United States, made $38M total there, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation did even better with a $41.6M run.

While this does raise some interesting implications about the power of the foreign box office over the domestic one, it also raises concerns about whether or not a franchise can be sustained by the foreign market alone. Universal themselves don’t seem to be particularly worried, according to insiders, as they think the movie will do well enough overseas to counteract a domestic underperformance (which is looking increasingly likely). If South Korea’s opening is of any indication, then perhaps this unusually-high level of confidence is warranted after all.

The Mummy rises on on June 9, 2017, kickstarting the Dark Universe. The movie’s cast includes Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, and Javier Botet. The next installment of the Dark Universe, The Bride of Frankenstein, will be released on February 14, 2019. Other projects that are in development for the setting include reboots of Van Helsing, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Wolf Man, Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Source: Deadline