Bob Violence

I'm gonna go out on a craaaazy limb and guess that they're overestimating The Stolen Years.

Fly Me to the Moon is listed twice (as a 9/30 and December TBD release). So I guess Stalingrad is getting the Russian quota instead of August Eighth? Will August Eighth even be released? Not that it matters to me one way or the other.

You can say the same thing about FF6 and Skyfall (both widely pirated before release) and they still managed $60m+. Story isn't everything.

Thanks. I have a hunch Gatsby is getting released because it was a Village Roadshow co-production and they're somewhat active in the Chinese market (they co-produced Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons). Just a guess though, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. IMO it's the most unexpected Hollywood import of the year, except maybe Django. There's already been one Korean quota release (The Thieves) but I would love it if they used another for Snowpiercer. Not holding my breath though. Edit: How was Mr. Go handled? That wasn't a quota title, was it? I'm kind of fuzzy on how co-productions are classified.

I don't know where you people are getting that I claimed kids won't see JP3D. I claimed kids' movies (a category from which I exclude JP3D, for the reason mentioned above) tend to do a larger proportion of their three-day gross on Saturday and Sunday. If it doesn't work that way in China, fine, but saying "kids see JP3D too" isn't a response.

CA1 came out in 2011 and did...not great, but about the same as Thor (a little less than ¥100m). It doesn't make any less sense to release CA2 than to release Thor 2. Every Marvel Studios film to date has been released in China (even The Incredible Hulk) and they're going to want to keep that streak going, especially after IM3.

Disney gets five quota slots? I guess that makes sense since they're getting five this year, though I didn't know how IM3 counted since it's a co-production. So is there a specific studio-by-studio allocation, or can it change?

I see kids at almost every movie I see here, it doesn't mean the movie is targeting them the way something like MU is. I don't see "a kids' movie" to be the same thing as "a movie kids can watch."

By that standard so are most Hollywood imports in China. Change "family movie" to "kids' movie" or "animated movie" if it makes you feel better.

They don't have much else on their plate for next year. Rio 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes should get Chinese releases, Fox will no doubt push hard for DoFP , and then the fourth release (assuming they get the same number of quota slots next year) will be a tossup. Could be Frankenstein, The Secret Service, or maybe a holdover from late 2013 (The Monuments Men? Walking with Dinosaurs?). No Chinese release for First Class might hurt DoFP's chances, but every other X-film has been released and franchises have skipped entries here before.

Kids/family movies do proportionally more of their business on Saturday and Sunday. Unless it's different in China, but I doubt it. Still might be a close race though.

What was the last one? IA4? I thought The Croods might've won Children's Day, but nope, it was STID...

But the banhammer acted as free publicity for bootlegs--tons of people hopped online to watch ripped copies after the Chinese release was pulled. Most of those people wouldn't have seen the movie in theaters anyway, but the ones who would've gone had no reason to show up for the eventual re-release (which was so minimally promoted that my usual theater had no posters for it, because they'd already thrown out the originals and the distributor didn't provide new ones). There's little doubt in my mind DU could've done at least $10m if it had been released when it was supposed to be, which would still be poor for a Hollywood import but respectable for a 165-minute hard-R period film. There's no inherent reason it should've done worse than, say, The Grey or Conan the Barbarian.

Bear in mind that movies were re-released all the time in the pre-home video era. Gone with the Wind was reissued in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1974, with some less frequent re-releases in the home video era. The Wizard of Oz was reissued in 1949, 1955, 1970, and 1971, and again had some occasional re-releases after video came along. The Sound of Music was reissued in 1973 and 1978. The Godfather was reissued in 1973, less than a year after the original release. And it was uncontroversial to count all the releases together for record purposes--that's how GWTW was able to keep the title of "highest grosser of all time" until The Sound of Music, even though some other films beat GWTW's initial release by a wide margin (Ben Hur made well over twice as much on its initial release as GWTW did on its). "Highest-grossing initial release" was an important record too, but it wasn't the end-all-be-all.

There's a long history of companies revamping Spider-Man for the Japanese market. There was a manga adaptation all the way back in 1970 (which Marvel eventually killed because it got too dark and weird), and the late '70s brought this incredible...thing. I don't know how popular these actually were, but they probably helped ingrain the character in the minds of the Japanese public.

No, they've already lined up an online/VOD release. Universal has other stuff they can release, like maybe Riddick.

Could it be nothing at all? They don't really have much to choose from. Jack Ryan is a December release, so that's out--unless quota slots can be carried over, but from what I understand they can't. The Wolf of Wall Street wouldn't be the unlikeliest quota release, if stuff like Anna Karenina and Gatsby can come out, but it comes out in the U.S. on November 15th and that's cutting it awfully close. The only thing they have between now and then is Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (forget it). If they just want to release something for the sake of releasing it, they could burn off their last slot with Hansel and Gretel, even though people have been watching that for months.

Saw JP3D tonight. 9:30 IMAX screening, maybe 75-80% full. The movie holds up well but the 3D conversion just reinforced my belief that older films shouldn't be converted. The conversion process requires that the picture be "cleaned up" first, and that results in large chunks of the film looking like they were retouched with an airbrush. Yech. It's also instructional to see that a PG-13 movie from 1993 is too scary to be released uncut in 2013 China.

Grant Morrison (who did a '90s Flash run with Mark Millar that I thought was pretty good) wanted to write a Flash movie at one point: http://mindlessones.com/2011/06/30/grant-morrison-supergods-interview-transcript/ Sounds like the idea got shot down as a movie, which isn't surprising, since I'm sure WB has no interest in "a superhero movie that isn't a superhero movie." He still wants to do it as a comic, though.

Thirty-day runs are standard for both foreign and domestic films, unless they get an extension from the Film Bureau--though relatively few movies even make it to 30 days, due to poor legs and/or too much competition. (Second-run theaters don't really exist here.) Avatar got an extended run and was around for about three months. But as firedeep said a couple of pages back, the Film Bureau's all but stopped giving extensions to foreign films, in what I suspect is an effort to reduce the impact of the import quota expansion in 2012. It's way too early to speculate about what will happen with Avatar 2, since it's probably at least three years away and the regulators are constantly changing their minds about one thing or the other. We can say for sure that it would have a better chance of an extended run if it's set up as a Chinese co-production, though that's still no guarantee. IM3 wasn't extended, but it got a six-week initial run instead of just four (which I didn't realize until I saw firedeep's post--I thought it got a two-week extension). It should be interesting to see what happens with TF4, which is the next big co-production. But if Avatar 2 came out today, as a regular Hollywood import, it would probably be gone after 30 days, unless there was absolutely nothing else in the release pipeline.

If you're arguing that PR is more of a "theater experience" than FF6, I agree, though I feel the action direction in PR has been very overrated. If you're arguing that PR wouldn't have been hurt by HD rips, well, that's purely in the realm of speculation, but FF6 easily lost $30m and probably more from its lousy mainland release date. If PR had been treated the same way--pushed back two months and then required to compete with HD bootlegs--it's naive to think it wouldn't have been seriously hurt as well. PR was phenomenally fortunate to secure a release date within one month of the international bow, which only one other Hollywood summer title (Man of Steel) managed to do this year. (And that both films are Legendary productions is probably no coincidence.)

The only bootleg copies of PR out there are crappy cam rips, which nobody in their right mind considers an acceptable substitute for a theatrical viewing. If PR had the same problem as FF6 (high-quality HD rips) then we wouldn't be talking about a $100m+ gross.

It's the Qixi Festival (= Chinese Valentine's Day). The dinner-and-a-movie crowd is out in force.

Take a look at the grosses for the stuff released around Titanic. It did more than 4x the gross of the #2 movie (Avatar only did 2x) and nearly 10x the gross of the biggest movie of the following year. (What happened in 1999 anyway? Those numbers are awful compared to previous years.) Absolutely crazy.

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon has been dated for 9/28 in the mainland, so that might be in the mix as well.