Photo: Columbia Pictures
Adapted from Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s award-winning video game of the same name, Uncharted debuted with an estimated $44 million at the domestic box office on Sunday. According to Comscore, $51 million is also projected over the Presidents’ Day weekend. Spider-Man star Tom Holland is not going down from his box office reign any time soon.
Holland features in this latest adventure film as Nathan Drake, a quick-witted and cunning adventurer. Alongside treasure hunter Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), the two attempt to recover the lost fortune of explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Other cast members include Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali, and Tati Gabrielle.
Shawn Levy, who produced Stranger Things, had initially been set to direct the film but had to back out for another video game-inspired movie Free Guy, where Ryan Reynolds leads the cast. On the set of Free Guy in 2019, Levy told EW that he aimed to make a film that did not only appeal to gamers, as he called the notion of video game movie curses “pretty historically accurate.”
Levy told EW, “I think you’re often obsessed with servicing the fans of that video game, understandably. We want a movie that will appeal to gamers, but we will have failed if we only appeal to gamers. We really want a broadly accessible movie.”
Sony then sought director Ruben Fleischer who said he was “completely blown away” by the script.
“I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that it was a fast-moving train I was hopping aboard, but I was so stoked,” Fleischer told EW. Holland then added, “It was stressful. We were all guns blazing.”
Uncharted seems impenetrable to the video game movie curse. It was followed by Channing Tatum’s directorial debut in family comedy film Dog, which amassed an estimated $15.1 million following its February 18 release. The film focused on an Army ranger, also played by Tatum, and his fluffy companion as they hurry to attend a soldier’s funeral down the Pacific Coast. It is projected to come up to $18 million this long weekend.On the other hand, the record-breaking Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Holland plays the titular character, remained steady at third place. It brought in an additional $7.2 million by Sunday. Murder mystery Death on the Nile by Kenneth Branagh and Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass Forever, a nostalgic slapstick comedy, came in at fourth and fifth place, respectively. The former garnered an additional $6.2 million, and the latter brought in $5.2 million.
