Bob Violence

The $7m is its gross to date in Taiwan, where it opened on the 8th. (It may have technically been in previews before the 11th, but from what I can tell these "previews" were not really much different from a standard release, and even Paramount's own marketing in Taiwan was inconsistent on the "official" release date.) I believe $7m would put its second-weekend gross to date at #2 for the year, behind Fast X with $7.68m, but it's not an entirely fair comparison since Fast X had three extra days (it opened on Wednesday instead of a Saturday). TGM had done $7.6m by the end of its second weekend, but it was a Tuesday release so it had yet another extra day. MI6 earned a smidge more than $10m over two weekends with a Wednesday opening. EDIT: Apparently MI6 made $2.4m in Taiwan on its opening Wednesday through Friday, so removing that leaves $7.6m over the same period that DR has been in theaters. I see no basis for declaring $7m a "best franchise opening" in Taiwan.

Well, he was one hell of an actor. It's been almost a decade since he acted in anything, and if he isn't going to do it in JTTW2 (which he isn't even directing) then I have to wonder if he'll ever do it again. He's announced all sorts of acting projects over the years but they never seem to get any closer to actually happening. But he's not even 55 yet, so he's got plenty of time left.

Look at the bright side—if Harvey had gotten his hands on Ip Man 3, he probably would've decided it's at least 20 minutes too long (as he does with virtually every Asian movie he picks up) and ordered it recut into near-incoherence. Also, CTHD2 is getting a simultaneous theatrical and Netflix release in the U.S., which all but guarantees it won't get a wide release in theaters (indeed several major theater chains—including AMC, which is Chinese-owned and has been quite supportive of Asian cinema—have already said they won't show it). On top of that it will only be shown on IMAX screens, which further limits the possibilities for expansion. I would say that Harvey is only involved with the film to expand his presence in China and doesn't really care how it does in America, but then they made the damn thing in English, so I don't know what he was thinking.

The Grandmaster got a relatively wide release in the U.S. (over 10x the screen count of any previous WKW film) because Harvey Weinstein had fantasies that it would be the next Crouching Tiger or Hero. (This was much the same reason he gave Iron Monkey a wide release in 2001—Crouching Tiger had just shattered records for a foreign-language film and the marketing for Iron Monkey played up the shared link with Yuen Woo-ping.) He was dead wrong about The Grandmaster's breakout potential, but at least he wrung a couple of well-deserved Oscar nominations out of it...

In most countries this franchise is known exclusively through Snoopy merchandise. Unfortunately that's not much help when the movie is mostly centered on some round-headed kid.

Not that it really matters at this stage, but The Walk is finally coming out on January 22nd.

So DMG is planning to release a 3D conversion of Terminator 2 next summer...

Besides the ones already mentioned—all of which I also recommend, except Red Amnesia which I haven't seen but very much want to—Dust in the Wind is a beautiful classic, and Motorway is simple but slick (good for airplane viewing, I think). And watching The Asssassin on a tiny airline monitor is insanity—get an HD copy and see it on a big TV.

It's normal in China to make up at least one day of a holiday, though the more generous workplaces won't make you do it.

I don't think it's an official directive, but it's a perfectly predictable consequence of letting exhibitors keep all of the box office and setting box-office targets. (The article I linked above doesn't say who issued the targets, but this one says they came from China Film Group themselves.) In other words, theaters have a strong incentive to sell tickets, but they have absolutely no incentive to do so by reducing ticket prices. Here's what I mean by that: if the exhibitor normally keeps 57% of the ticket price, then a ticket that normally sells for 40 yuan would bring them around 23 yuan in revenue. If the exhibitor gets to keep 100% of the box office, they could lower the ticket price to, say, 25-30 yuan, keep all of it, and potentially sell more tickets thanks to the lower price. But with this film, lowering the ticket prices could put them at risk of missing the targets, so they aren't doing that, and in fact the average ticket price for Hundred Regiments is apparently higher than it is for the typical 2D film. By selling tickets for Hundred Regiments to patrons who are actually going to other films, the theaters not only increase their revenue but also help their chances of meeting the targets. Some amount of box-office theft would've occurred even without the targets—100% of ticket sales is waaaay too tempting—but the targets probably made the situation worse.

Re: the Hundred Regiments controversy—the issue isn't just bulk buying by government agencies, which has plenty of precedent: The Founding of a Republic and Beginning of the Great Revival both benefited from that, and at one point the highest-grossing domestic production of all time was an anti-corruption film called Final Decision (2000) that government employees were required to attend. In the case of Hundred Regiments it also appears that theaters are redirecting box office from other films by printing out tickets for Hundred Regiments and then hand-writing in the names of other films that people actually want to see.

This might be a long shot, but if anyone knows of a media contact for Sil-Metropole Organisation (银都电影发行公司), please send me a PM.

Books aren't as strictly policed as movies, though. A few years ago Stanley Kwan tried to adapt Han Han's 《他的国》 (a book readily available in shops throughout the country) and it didn't even make it through pre-production censorship. In other news, a 162-minute extended cut of Tiny Times 4 is being released on the 20th. Aside from being a pathetically desperate cash grab, it will probably have the lowest quality-to-running-time ratio of any movie ever made.

The last one was apparently Ultraman Zero: The Movie in July 2012, about nine months after the Conan film (Quarter of Silence). It performed almost identically, with 20m yuan according to these figures. Another Conan film (The Eleventh Striker) was supposed to be released in September 2012—I think I even saw some marketing for it—but the big anti-Japanese protests broke out in August and it was canceled. Children's Day.

WB and Village Roadshow likely decided that San Andreas (June 2nd in China) is a safer bet for that market and threw their weight behind it instead. On a related note: PR is getting a sequel because it was a huge surprise hit in a market that's growing at a dizzying rate. Fury Road could do that in theory, but I very much doubt it'll have the same outsized success in China, partly because of audience tastes and partly because it will be a late release if it opens there at all (PR opened in China two weeks behind the U.S., but FR might well not open before July).

No Marvel movie has ever opened in China before the U.S. I guess Thor 2 and Winter Soldier were technically earlier because they were day-and-date with the U.S. and China is ~12 hours ahead—but then (like nearly all Marvel movies) the U.S. got those later than most markets, so it's not as if there weren't plenty of earlier opportunities for piracy. In any case the only pirated copies likely to be circulating by the 12th will be cam rips. It sucks for Marvel that they'll be missing the holiday, but that was completely expected. I am a bit surprised they couldn't manage anything better than a Tuesday.

"Dumb" comedies usually do reasonably well on video (see also: this week's #2), but I think The Interview was helped a lot by pricing. The BD retails for $20 and is readily available for less than $15. The DVD is similarly cheap relative to the norm. Some Wal-Marts had the Blu in-store for $10 and the DVD for $8. That puts it in impulse-buy category for a lot of people and is unusually cheap for a non-catalog studio title. For comparison, Sony normally has a $35 MSRP for non-catalog BDs (more if it's a DVD combo pack), and only rarely will they be available for less than $20 the week of release.

Very few of those 37 minutes were censorship cuts, though. The local distributor just cut out everything that wasn't absolutely essential to the plot. Maybe the Film Bureau really did censor nearly 40 minutes of Kingsman, but I think that might qualify it as the most heavily censored film ever released to Chinese theaters. Even all the cuts to Django Unchained amounted to a minute or two. Cloud Atlas isn't the only time an import has been heavily recut by the Chinese distributor—in another example, The Grey was missing about 20 minutes of footage when it came out in China, most of which would've posed no problems at the Film Bureau—so maybe the 39 minutes in Kingsman are combination of censorship edits (which the film would certainly need) and "improvements" by the distributor.

Well, see, there's the thing, short of physically incapacitating James there's nothing Universal can do. Universal didn't pick up the books until they were already a phenomenon and her contract gives her approval over basically everything. The only reason she didn't get her way on the first film is because she was presumably just blindsided by it all. It's clear that won't happen again, e.g. James' alleged insistence on adapting the sequel herself (which Universal is contractually required to allow if she wants to do so). The studio has no leverage except to threaten not to make the sequels at all, which might not be much of a threat to someone whose income is already in the high eight figures (plus the contract might just allow her to take the franchise elsewhere).

Paddington confirmed for March 5th:

TT2 decreased from one, TT3 increased from both. TT4 is the last part because he's out of books (he already managed to get four films out of three books). But not to worry, Guo will continue to grace us with his cinematic genius, as he's preparing an original-to-the-screen sci-fi film that will supposedly star Zhao Wei, Huang Xiaoming, and Tong Dawei, every one of whom should know better. The ending of TT4 should be hilarious if it follows the novels.

Kung Fu Hustle 3D (which has been bounced around the schedule enough already) now set for January 15th.

Christmas no, New Year's yes. But it's only three days and one of those is to be made up on Sunday. From the sound of it Gone with the Bullets is getting a reaction more like The Sun Also Rises (some praise, mostly bewilderment) than Let the Bullets Fly (which was almost universally liked). The Hollywood Reporter has already run a review and their critic didn't like it at all, but actually I think he makes it sound pretty compelling. Wish I was still in China so I could decide for myself.

He came in June while Jolie was promoting Maleficent. I don't get why people think the government is still pissed off about Seven Years in Tibet when the director of that movie has spent the last few years on and off in China working on Wolf Totem. As for why Pitt isn't coming to promote Fury, keep in mind that Fury is a buyout release through Huayi Brothers instead of a revenue-shared studio release, so it may be as simple as Huayi not wanting to foot the bill for his visit. Another possibility is that Pitt doesn't want to do his first Chinese PR tour for a movie that's arriving a month late and doesn't have great box-office prospects.

The Wolverine didn't leak until November 6th, when the first rips of the DVD/BD showed up. It had been in Chinese theaters for three weeks by that point. There were only cam rips before that and I've never been convinced those have much of an impact on Chinese box office. I think it's safer to say that The Wolverine was never really a huge threat to begin with, seeing how the X-franchise had never been that big in China and the previous film (First Class) didn't even get a Chinese release. Combine that with indifferent WOM and ¥250m seemed like a reasonable ceiling, piracy or no. Of course it would've done better with an earlier release, but the same can be said for GOTG, TMNT, Maze Runner, Lucy (which actually did leak before Chinese release, as a Korean VOD rip), and basically every summer blockbuster that gets held over till the kids are back in school. I agree with firedeep that Kung Fu Jungle should've been moved to early December or maybe even late November, where its direct competition would've been Fury (WWII European theater, not an easy sell in China) and that Wong Fei-hung movie (not seeing much excitement for this and I think a Donnie Yen vehicle would have little trouble holding it off).