All is Not Lost: Pacific Rim Hits #1 on the International Box Office

The apocalypse is cancelled. Just not in America.

Lets just come out and say it: Pacific Rim has been tracking below the prayerful expectations of many a nerd these past few weeks. See, we like superheroes and reboots and all (well, most of the time), but we also have an appreciation for good, original genre film, and when that actually shows up in the middle of the summer blockbuster season, we really want it to prove to Hollywood that they should do more of this kind of thing. So it was a bit of a blow to find out that the movie came in behind Grown Ups 2 in its opening weekend, even accounting for a slightly off-base marketing campaign.

But echoing events in the movie, the international community has banded together to defeat the slavering monster of Pacific Rim being a flop, by delivering it to the top of the international box office after it opened France, Germany, Hong Kong, and Holland. That brings its current box office totals to $178.5 million, for a film that Deadline estimates cost between $180 and $220 million to make. And there is yet more hope: the movie has yet to open in China, an increasingly powerful audience for American action films, Spain, Japan, where many of the movie’s roots in anime might be most appreciated, and Brazil.

(Deadline via Geekosystem.)