Sting

Source: Emma Bjorndahl

‘Sting’

It looks to be a modest weekend at the UK-Ireland box office for new releases, with spider horror Sting crawling into 484 locations for Studiocanal, and the widest release coming from 20th anniversary screenings of Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, out at 524 sites for Warner Bros.

Holdovers including Warner Bros’ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Paramount’s IF, Sony’s The Garfield Movie and Disney’s Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes will endeavour to dominate the top spots.

Sting is directed by Kiah Roache-Turner. The feature, which shot in Australia, centres on a 12-year-old girl living in New York who forms a bond with a strange spider.

Australian filmmaker Roache-Turner and distributor Studiocanal will likely be hoping to emulate the success of last year’s Aussie horror hit Talk To Me, that grossed £2.5m in the UK-Ireland box office for Altitude after its July 28 release, and opened to a confident £562,772 from 431 locations. A Talk To Me sequel is now in the works with A24, the US distributor of the first film.

Animated offerings out this weekend include Denis Chernov’s Russian family title Little Monsters, appearing in 350 venues for Miracle/Dazzler. Sony has Susumu Mitsunaka’s Japanese animated sports film Haikyu!!: The Dumpster Battle at 230 sites. The film is a sequel to the anime TV series.

Disney is opting for a limited release of Young Woman And The Sea at 80 sites. Daisy Ridley stars in this story of history-making swimmer Trudy Ederle, who in 1926 swum the English channel, breaking the men’s record in the process. Stephen Graham also stars.

Cycling drama Hard Miles is peddling its way into 70 locations for Munro Film. Daniel Hanna’s film sees Matthew Modine play a coach of a group of incarcerated youngsters at a correctional school in Colorado, who he teaches to work together on a gruelling bike ride from Denver to the Grand Canyon. 

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi romance The Beast starring Lea Seydoux and George MacKay is out at 67 sites for Vertigo Releasing.

Zee Studios has Sharan Sharma’s Mr & Mrs. Mahi, a Hindi-language romantic sports drama starring Rajkummar Rao and Janhvi Kapoor, at 59 cinemas. 

In event cinema, The Royal Opera House has showings of ballet A Message In A Bottle, set to the songs of Sting, in around 35 sites.

Also out this weekend is Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan’s A House In Jerusalem, that follows a grief-stricken daughter and father who relocate from England to the Jerusalem, released by Peccadillo Pictures.