Louis 19 is king at the box office

Best opening box office for a Quebec film in recent memory is Louis 19, le roi des ondes, which scored a three-day weekend take of $221,287 on 34 screens.

The highly promoted comedy from director Michel Poulette ranked number one for the April 1-3 period. It is distributed by Malofilm Distribution.

For the same dates, the French-language version of Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains pulled in just over $23,000 on 20 screens. It had cumulative receipts of $184,000 after 17 days in release.

Action heats up in Nova Scotia

Spring and summer production is off to a good start in Nova Scotia. At the end of this month, Needful Productions and Castle Rock Pictures will shoot the movie version of Stephen King’s novel Dolores Claiborne in the province. Kathy Bates, Christopher Plummer and Jennifer Jason Leigh will star, under the direction of Taylor Hackford. Chuck Mulvehill is the producer.

The feature will shoot in Lunenburg, Blue Rocks and Chester starting April 26.

As well, The Scarlet Letter, director Roland Joffe’s new feature film based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, will be shooting mainly in Nova Scotia. According to Elizabeth Rhuland of the Shelburne N.S. Bid Commission, Shelburne initially attracted the production team because of its seventeenth century appearance. The town had buried all electrical wires around its harbor in order to create an historical area for Halifax-based Citadel Films’ Mary Silliman’s War.

To get The Scarlet Letter, the town council replaced utility poles on several streets with underground wiring. The majority of the Shelburne shoot will take place in July and August.

The $30 million feature, coproduced by Joffe and Dodi Fayed, is an Allied Stars/Lightmotive Productions film and will star Demi Moore.

Race pulls ’em in

Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad, an Atlantis Films production in association with United Image Entertainment, the u.s. Family Channel, Black Entertainment Television and the CTV Television Network, pulled in great numbers when it premiered in the u.s. on the Family Channel in February. It became the highest-rated premiere of an original movie in the cable network’s history.