Shane Jacobson's Oddball doubles box office to $2 million in two days

Australian audiences have taken to Oddball like a duck – or, perhaps, like a penguin – to water.

The family film, which is based on the true story of a Warrnambool chicken farmer who put his maremma sheepdog to work saving a penguin colony from feral animals, officially opened last Thursday and took just under $1 million over the four days up to and including Sunday.

With previews included, it came in at $1,071,513, the fifth best performer of the weekend. It took a respectable $3408 per screen, slightly less than number three film Pixels in its second week ($3785). The top-ranking film of the weekend was Everest, which took $3.277 million and averaged $6194 per screen.

But all that was before school holidays kicked in, and the positive word-of-mouth for the movie, which stars Shane Jacobson as Allan “Swampy” Marsh, began to circulate in earnest. In the two days since, Oddball has more than doubled its take.

As of Tuesday, its box office stood at $2,129,619. It was the second highest film on the day, overtaking both Everest and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, and bettered only by Pixels.

Star of Oddball Shane Jacobson.

According to distributor Roadshow, the screen average for the week is currently $7,069. That represents a 107 per cent increase in the per-screen performance of the film (for context, most wide-release films can be expected to shed between 20 and 50 per cent of their box office from week 1 to week 2).

Oddball is the first feature for LA-based, Brisbane-born, Melbourne-raised director Stuart McDonald, who has been working in the industry for more than 20 years.

“We are so excited with this result,” he said from Los Angeles. “The dog in the movie is real, the penguins are real, and it’s based on a true story.” “The dog genre has got legs,” McDonald says. “Four of them.”