21/10/2005

Working Title Films’s children film Nanny McPhee directed by Kirk Jones, scripted and acted by Emma Thompson, is the only European film coming out today, released by UIP with 500 prints spread across the UK and Ireland.

The family film is an adaptation of the Nurse Matilda books written in the early 1960s by Christianna Brand. It’s the story of an eccentric nanny, a Mary Poppins type but ugly -courageously played by Emma Thompson- who is hired to tame the seven troubled kids of a handsome widower (Colin Firth). The film is brought to life by director Kirk Jones, seven years after his critically-acclaimed Waking Ned. Lindsay Doran who previously collaborated with Emma Thomspon on Sense And Sensibility is producing this film with Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
Nanny McPhee has to compete for screen time with another family film opening today: Tim Burton’s animated film Corpse Bride (although targeting a slightly older audience), as well as with animated hit Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were Rabbit [+see also:
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film profile] and Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist [+see also:
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film profile] both still playing very strongly theatrically. The first big screen adventures of Wallace & Gromit released by UIP last Friday grossed over £9,3m (€ 13.7m) in its opening weekend, taking by far the lead of last weekend’s UK/Irish box office, while Oliver Twist released by Pathé managed to take the fifth place with another £504,009 (€ 743,430) in its second week, reaching a total gross of £1,5m (€ 2.2m), just under two UK films Pride & Prejudice at number 3 (£12,6m (€ 18.6m) total in 5 weeks) and Kinky Boots at number 4 (£1,5m (€ 2.2m) total in two weeks).