Box Office: 'Sully' Flies High to $35.5 Million U.S. Opening

Tom Hanks’ Sully has taken off with a stellar $35.5 million at 3,525 North American locations, marking a solid start to the fall box office season.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Sully handily outperformed recent expectations, which had been in the $25 million range. The action-adventure, which re-creates 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson” emergency landing, generated an A CinemaScore in a strong signal that Sully should continue to draw well in coming weeks.

Sony-Screen Gems drama When the Bough Breaks opened respectably in second with $15 million at 2,246 sites. Lionsgate’s launch of European animated comedy The Wild Life generated only modest interest with less than $3.4 million at 2,493 locations and Relativity’s horror film The Disappointments Room was nearly invisible with $1.4 million at 1,554 screens for a dismal $901 per-screen average.

Related: Tom Hanks’ ‘Sully’ Lifts Off With $12 Million Friday

Sully stars Hanks as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the career pilot who successfully landed a damaged US Airways jet in the Hudson River after it hit a flock of geese following takeoff from LaGuardia Airport. Eastwood directed from a script by Todd Komarnicki, based on the autobiography Highest Duty by Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow.

Sully generated the top gross for a post-Labor Day weekend and the fifth-best September opening ever after Hotel Transylvania 2, Hotel Transylvania, Insidious: Chapter 2, and Sweet Home Alabama. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Sept. 2 and has received largely laudatory reviews with a current 84% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Audiences were 80% over 35 and 56% female. Sully generated $4 million from 375 Imax locations for a $10,666 average in what’s touted as the first Hollywood film ever shot entirely on Imax cameras.

Aaron Eckhart stars as First Officer Jeffrey Skiles and Laura Linney as Sullenberger’s spouse Lorraine.

Related: Tom Hanks Writing, May Star in World War II Drama ‘Greyhound’

Sully easily outperformed the opening of Hanks’ 2012 hostage drama Captain Phillips, which opened with $25.7 million on its way to a domestic total of $107 million. Hanks’ most recent film, Bridge of Spies, debuted in mid-October with a $15.4 million opening weekend at 2,811 sites and wound up with a $72 million domestic total.

Sully has a production budget of about $60 million, so it will need to show holdover strength in the following weekends to make it into profitable territory. Village Roadshow Pictures is a co-producer and co-financer with Warner Bros.

Sully took in $9.5 million at 3,600 screens in 39 international markets, led by $2.3 million in Australia. It generated the top opening for an Eastwood film in Russia with $925,000 on 882 screens.

Related: Box Office: ‘Sully’ Soaring to $32 Million Opening Weekend

When the Bough Breaks, which has a modest $10 million production budget, stars Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall as a couple who desperately wants a baby. They hire a surrogate, played by Jaz Sinclair, who develops a psychotic fixation on the husband as the pregnancy progresses.

Sony’s third weekend of horror-thriller Don’t Breathe finished third with $8.2 million at 3,384 locations to bring its 17-day total to $66.8 million. Warner’s sixth weekend of Suicide Squad followed with $5.7 million at 3,103 sites for a domestic total of $307.4 million.

Get more from Variety and Variety411: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter