James Bond left the box office shaken and stirred on its first evening in cinemas on Monday, taking £4.1m ($6.2m) in 647 venues across the UK.
Screenings started at 8.15pm, a quarter of an hour after the film debuted at London’s Royal Albert Hall to a gala audience including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
Spectre is the 24th Bond film and the second to be directed by Sam Mendes. The previous in the series, 2012’s Skyfall, took £6.2m ($9.5m) on its first day, but had the whole day in which to do so.
Most of the cinemas that screened Spectre on Monday only had time to show the 150-minute film once or twice.
Sony, Spectre’s distributors, described the film’s performance as spectacular. However, it has to go some way to beat Skyfall, the highest-grossing film ever in the UK, with a British box office take of £103m ($162m) and $1.1bn worldwide.
Spectre has been critically acclaimed, with five-star reviews in the Guardian and the Telegraph. Though few industry experts believe it can beat Skyfall’s performance, Deadline reports that they expect the film to take around £35m ($54m) in its first week.
The film is released in the US on 6 November.
