'The Impossible' Set to Smash Another Spanish Box Office Record

MADRID - Juan Antonio Bayona's The Impossible is set to unseat Alejandro Amenabar's The Others as the highest-grossing release for a Spanish film in its home market ever.

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It has already grossed more than €27.5 million ($35.4 million) at the box office and sold some 4 million tickets in Spain since its Oct. 11 premiere in theaters. That is just shy of the $35.5 million that the Nicole Kidman mystery had snagged in 2001. That made it the highest-grossing release here to-date that qualifies as a Spanish production due to its Spanish director and production firm. Both releases are English-language films.

Distributed in Spain by Warner Bros. Pictures and starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, The Impossible is a drama about a family dealing with the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. It already recorded the largest-ever opening weekend box office for a Spanish film in Spain. 

Produced by Belen Atienza and Enrique Lopez Lavigne's Apaches Entertainment and Telecinco Cinema, the film branch of media giant Mediaset Espana, The Impossible has become a social phenomenon in Spain and a must for moviegoers thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign by Telecinco Cinema.

The company, which posted an operating profit of $53.8 million for the first half of its fiscal year, is hoping The Impossible can hold onto its top spot in the weekly box office rankings ahead of the just-released Skyfall. Expectations of a long, rainy holiday weekend in Spain bode well for box office earnings.

Spanish cinema currently holds a 17.1 percent share of the domestic market, two points more than last year at the same time, according to the Spanish producers' federation FAPAE.