Penguins more popular than Tom Cruise!!

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Penguin passion leaves Cruise in box office cold
July 11, 2005

LOS ANGELES: Tom Cruise is being savaged at the US box office by a troupe of lovelorn birds.

March of the Penguins, a low-budget wildlife film about the mating habits of the emperor penguin, is promising to be the surprise hit of the northern summer after pulling in larger audiences at the 20 cinemas where it has been shown than Cruise's War of the Worlds and Batman Begins combined. It has proved so popular in its first two weeks that it was opening at 350 others this weekend.
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The film - described by one critic as an avian When Harry Met Sally -was born with an advertisement in a French newspaper in 1991 that read: "Wanted, biologist willing to spend 14 months at the end of the world." Luc Jacquet, who at 24 had just graduated with a Masters in animal biology from Lyons University, applied and found himself in Antarctica with a 35mm camera and instructions to "follow the bloody birds around until they mate".

It was not until 2000 that he wrote the screenplay: a love story about penguins who walk up to 110km though blizzards in search of the right ice shelf on which to breed.

With funding from National Geographic, he returned to Antarctica for 13 months, trailing a flock of birds and shooting the footage of love, sex, birth and death. "I think they are a very special species," he said. "There are very few animals, or even humans, that can communicate their feelings so well and make us laugh and weep at the same time." The original French-language version of the film - which cost just $11.7million to make - has been the third-most successful in France this year.

To get a US showing, the script was revised and Morgan Freeman was brought in as narrator.

The "penguin movie", as it is known in the industry, took an average $35,000 at each cinema it screened at last weekend, compared with $25,700 for War of the Worlds and $6900 for Batman Begins.

The Sunday Times

More:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15884713%255E2703,00.html

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. There's a theater in Minneapolis that's showing that film.

The marquee reads:
"March of the Penguins"
starring
Penguins

:7

Penguins always crack me up. I just might go see that film. It certainly sounds more intelligent than any of the mainstream Hollywood releases that's playing now. It also taps into the underserved market of adults who like movies but don't like overblown special effects, mindless violence, or unnecessary cursing.