As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles slice their way through domestic box office this weekend with a potential $65M, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael are bowing in 19 overseas markets with a cume of $12M through Friday. The Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies reboot is being led by Russia with a two-day cume of $5.5M. This is getting to be a serious trend, with Russia the lead debut market for several movies this year, including last week’s Guardians Of The Galaxy and the week prior’s Hercules. Despite ongoing diplomatic issues, and the potential for a cap on Hollywood imports down the line with Vladimir Putin having banned food imports from the West this week, Turtle soup wasn’t on the menu.

TMNT also opened in Mexico on Thursday and has a two-day cume of $2.6M. Elsewhere, it had a $310K Friday in Taiwan and earned $285K in Indonesia. Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Danny Woodburn, Abby Elliott, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Alan Ritchson and Minae Noji star in the Michael Bay-produced film that’s directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Previous adaptations of the comic series include 2007’s animated TMNT on a budget of $34M, which made about $95M worldwide (with about $13M less internationally than in North America), and 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, budgeted at about $13.5M, with a little over $200M in global box office. That film made twice as much domestic as overseas, but those were the days before the powerhouse, if sometimes fast-burn, markets such as Russia, China, and Korea rose to their current prominence. I’ll have expanded numbers tomorrow on Turtles and the other major new entry Into The Storm (which also bowed in Russia). We’ll also find out how Lucy is continuing to fare in France after giving Luc Besson his best opening ever on Wednesday, and we’ll check in with The Inbetweeners sequel in the UK, where the movie broke the all-time comedy debut record earlier this week.

Source: Deadline.com