Trailer
Plot summary
Deep inside the Esa-ala Cave in Papua New Guinea, master diver Frank McGuire has spent weeks exploring from a forward base camp. Financier Carl Hurley, his girlfriend Victoria and Frank's seventeen-year-old son Josh travel to the site as the team prepares to dive into an unexplored section of the system. Above ground a tropical storm builds, and the surface crew cannot warn the divers below. The storm becomes a cyclone, and flash floods cut off the entrance. With their exit gone and supplies limited, Frank, Josh, Carl and the rest of the crew must cross an unexplored tunnel to reach the sea.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sanctum (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Real caves were filmed in South Australia's cave-diving region around Mount Gambier, and stunt diver Agnes Milowka, who appears as a double and is the one playing Judes' drowning scene, drowned in one of those caves on February 27, 2011 after reportedly running out of air, having left her spare tank behind.- Sanctum was inspired by co-writer Andrew Wight's experience of a 1988 cave-diving expedition in Australia in which 13 cavers became trapped in one of the world's largest underwater cave systems in Nullarbor Plain after a freak storm collapsed the entrance; that incident was documented in the film Nullarbor Dreaming.
- James Cameron served as executive producer, and Sanctum employs the 3D photography techniques he developed to film Avatar, though most of the film was shot in Australia rather than the Papua New Guinea cave where the story is set.
- Sanctum opened with $9.2 million in its first weekend, coming in second behind The Roommate, and as of March 2011 it was the tenth-highest-grossing American film at the box office.
- Universal Pictures and Relativity Media paid $12 million for the rights to distribute the film in the United States and Canada and in several foreign countries.
