Queen seems to have quite the following in the Czech Republic.
Bohemian Rhapsody, which scored five Oscar nominations last week including Best Picture and Best Actor (Rami Malek as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury), surpassed James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic this past weekend to become the highest-grossing film in the history of the Czech Republic.
Since opening nearly three months ago, the Queen biopic has led the Czech box office for 11 of the last 13 weeks, being only briefly surpassed by Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and Aquaman.
This past weekend, Bohemian Rhapsody racked up a Czech box office tally of 7.2 million crowns ($320,000) to easily top second-place debut A Dog’s Way Home with 4 million crowns ($180,000).
That gives Bohemian Rhapsody a domestic tally at the Czech box office of 213 million crowns ($9.5 million), a new record and the highest tally of any film in the Czech Republic’s 26-year history.
To put that in perspective, that’s more than double of the 2nd-highest grossing film of 2018 at the Czech box office, Avengers: Infinity War, which took in 102 million crowns ($4.5 million). Infinity War, by the way, is the 4th highest-grossing film all-time worldwide.
Going by admissions totals, 1.4 million Czechs have now seen Bohemian Rhapsody in the cinema. That’s roughly 13% of the country’s 10.6 million population.
Easily holding the #1 position at the Czech box office with little competition in sight (the Matthew McConaughey bomb Serenity is this week’s big release in the Czech Republic), Bohemian Rhapsody should continue its record run at the local box office.
While the critical consensus to the movie has been decidedly mixed – I found it a decent rock opera but a poor biopic – audience ratings and worldwide box office tallies are painting a different picture.
Bohemian Rhapsody has now grossed $206 million at the US box office and $611 million abroad, for a whopping tally of $817 million.
That number makes it the 7th highest-grossing film at the worldwide box office in 2018, and the 74th all-time, nestled in-between 1996’s Independence Day and 2002’s Spider-Man.
But you won’t find more box office support for Bohemian Rhapsody than in the Czech Republic, where it is now the #1 top-grossing film of all time.
