Disney is leading the pack this weekend with Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny out at 743 venues, the widest UK-Ireland release of 2023 so far.
It opens ahead of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which debuted at 732 sites in May. The Cannes premiere, the fifth instalment in the franchise, sees James Mangold take the reins from Steven Spielberg. Harrison Ford returns as the titular adventurer, this time in 1969. Jones is living a quieter life, until his estranged goddaughter – played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge – contacts him with a mission in mind. Mads Mikkelsen plays the film’s Nazi villain, with Antonio Banderas and Toby Jones also starring.
It is the first title in the series to be released since 2008’s Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which played in around 540 sites in the UK for Paramount Pictures (who distributed the first four films), and was the highest-grossing title worldwide from the film’s franchise, with a lifetime gross of $790,653,942 (£395,326,971), opening to around £12m in the UK (according to figures from Box Office Mojo).
Dreamworks animation and Annecy premiere Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is playing at 576 sites for Universal. Kirk Demicco and Faryn Pearl direct the story of a teenage social outcast who discovers she is also a sea beast, with a voice cast including Lana Condor, Toni Collette and Jane Fonda.
Matthew Bourne’s ballet Sleeping Beauty is pirouetting into 223 locations this weekend for Trafalgar Releasing (in the UK only), to mark the 10th anniversary of the production.
Modern Films has Venice premiere La Syndicaliste (The Sitting Duck) playing at 27 sites. French filmmaker Jean-Paul Salome directs the feature starring Isabelle Huppert, and centres on the true-life case of a union organiser in the French nuclear industry who was attacked in her home while investigating her bosses’ shady deals, then accused of faking her own rape.
Also playing at 27 sites, Picturehouse has French filmmaker Léonor Serraille’s Cannes 2022 competition title Mother And Son, about a woman who moves from the Ivory Coast to the Paris suburbs with her two sons in the late 1980s.
Netflix has Chris Smith’s WHAM! at fewer than 25 sites. The Sheffield DocFest title traces the four-year rise of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s iconic pop duo.
Blue Finch Film Releasing has Small, Slow But Steady – a portrait of a young professional female boxer in Japan, directed by Sho Miyake – playing at nine sites, with a further 12 next week.
Dartmouth Films is running documentary My Extinction at five locations. Josh Appignanesi returns as both filmmaker and subject in the third in a trilogy based on his family life following The New Man and Husband (co-directed with Appignanesi’s wife, Devorah Baum), which follows the father-of-two’s existential crisis about climate activism.
Hello, Bookstore is out at 10 venues for Bulldog Film Distribution – a fly-on-the-wall documentary about an indie US bookstore, from filmmaker Adam Zax.
Sian Astor-Lewis’s debut feature, a micro-budget story of young queer desire, To Nowhere, opens at one site – Curzon Soho – this weekend, with further screenings in the coming weeks.
Also new this weekend is Satyaprem Ki Katha, an Indian Hindi-language musical romantic drama, directed by Sameer Vidwans and released by Bakrani Media, at 85 locations across the UK and Ireland.
The Hunting Of The Snark is being released for Imeperious Film, based on Lewis Carroll’s poem of the same name, and directed by Simon Davison.
Key holdovers include Asteroid City (Universal), Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse (Sony), The Flash (Warner Bros), The Little Mermaid (Disney) and No Hard Feelings (Sony)
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