Prince of Persia Fans @DW.org

I.E.: Release date leaked.



The Sands of Time have been given a date. Blu-ray.com is reporting that Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment's release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been leaked via a retailer announcement, with two separate Blu-ray versions coming on September 14, 2010. We're no industry wizards or anything, but we'll go ahead and make an assumption that the DVD release will also match up for the September date.

The flick is the long-awaited videogame adaptation of the Ubisoft game that graced the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube earlier in the decade, and revitalized the once-fantastic franchise, putting it into the forefront of the gaming industry once more with its stellar platforming and acrobatic twists and turns. The movie was met with mostly disappointment, but should look pretty good on your HDTV, regardless of which side you stand.

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We're quite surprised to report that Disney's movie adaptation of Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has become the highest grossing video game movie to date, according to Box Office Mojo. Until recently the reigning champ of video game adaptations was Paramount's Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie and Jon Voight, but the key to Prince of Persia's success has been its international revenue.

Although only raking in $80.5 million in the US, the film has generated a total of $213.1 million internationally, totaling $293.6 million. The key to the film's success has no doubt been the Disney branding coupled with the name recognition of Jerry Bruckheimer. It also scored much higher than Tomb Raider on review aggregate site Metacritic.com. Hopefully the trend of quality game-based films will continue to slowly erode the stigma they currently have. (*cough* Ewe Boll *cough*)

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How did the expensive videogame movie fare critically and commercially against other adaptations?



The live-action, $200+ million feature film adaptation of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opened in second place with a disappointing take of $37.8 million. Among critics, the Disney flick currently has a woeful 41% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Obviously, this is neither the commercial nor critical success that Disney or gamers had been hoping for with the film, the most expensive and ambitious game-to-film adaptation to date. But failure, sadly, is nothing new for the genre.

Prince of Persia currently sits at No. 12 on Box Office Mojo's listing of highest-grossing videogame adaptations. According to the site, the highest-grossing game-to-film is 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which grossed $274.7 million worldwide despite its 19% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Certainly, that should bode well for Prince of Persia ... except that Tomb Raider made $47 million in its opening weekend and that was almost a decade ago. But with an international debut of $97.7 million, Prince of Persia will need to continue to be a money-printing machine overseas if it wants to topple Tomb Raider from the top spot.

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