22/08/2008

Eight months after his first assault on Scandinavian screens, Arn Magnusson, the Knight Templar, is today launching his second offensive on Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish screens with a similar massive campaign orchestrated by Svensk Filmindustri.

Arn: The Kingdom at Road’s End, the second feature film based on Jan Guillou’s bestselling novels and the biggest production ever made in Scandinavia, is available on 206 screens (including 35 digital) all over Sweden today, as well as on 70 screens (including 20 digital) in Norway and 14 in Finland. A similar release pattern was put together for the first film.

“As the marketing for Arn: The Knight Templar [+see also:
trailer
film profile] was very successful, we will basically repeat with the second film what we did on the first film. The show continues,” said Eva Svendenius, head of Theatrical Distribution for SF Film Sweden.

The first film broke box office records in Sweden with over 1.1 million admissions. Over 170,000 cinema tickets were sold in Norway, 140,000 in Denmark and 25,000 in Finland.

In Arn: The Kingdom at Road’s End, also directed by Denmark’s Peter Flinth, the Knight Templar (Joakim Nätterqvist) comes home from the Holy Land, to bring peace to his country and marry his beloved Cecilia (Sofia Helin).

“I think this second film is perhaps better because you get directly into the plot and there is more action and more love,” said Svendenius. Other key actors include Stellan Skarsgård, Bibi Andersson, and Michael Nyqvist.

An international version – a compilation of the two feature films released in the Nordic countries – will be available early September to world distributors, according to SF International’s Ann-Kristin Westerberg, who shares world distribution licensing with Germany’s Telepool.

Arn: The Kingdom at Road’s End will open in Denmark on September 19.