Sivertsen did have a slight leg up, however, in that his film is a return to the big screen of a pair of enormously popular characters based on the works of Kjell Aukrust - characters so popular that previous 1975 big screen adaptation Pinchcliffe Grand Prix was shown on the big screen somewhere in Norway every day for twenty eight consecutive years with the final tally being five and a half million tickets sold in a country with a total population of 4.9 million.
In the last decade only 2012 offering Kon-Tiki has opened bigger.