Dunkirk soars high with $51mn US box office collection

Christopher Nolan's World War II drama Dunkirk has collected a whopping amount of $51 million on the opening weekend at the US box office. Starring Tom Hardy, Harry Styles, the much-anticipated flick opened at 3,720 venues.

Also read: Will Harry Styles survive in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk?

Based on the 1940's infamous Dunkirk evacuation, the movie grabbed $19.8 million on its opening day (July 21) along with $5.5 million collections from Thursday night previews. Christopher Nolan's previous movie Interstellar earned a total of $188 million at the worldwide box office.

While director Nolan is not ready to categorise it as a war film, Dunkirk deals with the infamous Operation Dynamo, the 1940's French evacuation in which 400,000 British soldiers were rescued in little over a week from the beaches of France after the Nazi forces invaded the country.

The cast of the movie features Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh and James D'Arcy while an analyst website RelishMix noted, "Keep in mind that over 67M of this total is attributed to pop star Harry Styles, who is not activated on social media. However, without Styles, the SMU drops to about 143M, which still easily exceeds the usual action-adventure SMU of 68M by opening week," as Deadline reports.

Universal's R-rated comedy Girls Trip ranked second in this week's list. Featuring Queen Latifah, Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, and Jada Pinkett Smith, the movie collected over $11 million on an opening day (Friday), setting the girls up for a $28 million weekend from 2,591 theatres.

And, after storming it up for the last few weeks at both the US and global box office, Andy Serkis starrer War for the Planet of the Apes and Tom Holland starrer Spider-Man: Homecoming ended up being in the third and fourth place respectively in the list.

The Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne sci-fi adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets earned a total of $6.5 million from 3,553 locations on Friday. Apart from that, Despicable Me 3, Baby Driver, and Wonder Woman also made to this week's list of top 10.