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Zhang Zifeng poses for fashion magazine
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China Box Office: ‘Valerian’ Wins Quiet Weekend
(Variety) The return of Western movies to Chinese cinemas after a month of absence was an anticlimax. The top ten films earned a combined $76.7 million, making it only the 20th best weekend of the year to date.
“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” became the film to finally depose “Wolf Warriors II” after an unprecedented run. “Valerian” opened as the top film with a creditable $28.8 million, according to data from Ent Group. That total was earned on close to 80,000 screenings per day. And it included $3 million from 431 IMAX screens.
Prior to this weekend, “Valerian” had a $132 million global cumulative total. So the additional Chinese score will give it some comfort. But it may not last long. Next weekend, “Dunkirk” will enjoy a wide opening and take all its IMAX theaters.
“Wolf Warriors II,” in its fifth week on release was second over the weekend with $15.8 million. That extended its all-time China box office record to $810 million.
After the end of the blackout period in which revenue-sharing releases of new Hollywood films are not permitted, the weekend saw two more. Disney’s “Cars 3” drove in for a $10.6 million weekend, earned from a fourth-place score on Friday, and an improvement to third on Saturday and Sunday. It played on around 42,000 screenings per day.
“Baby Driver,” edited by the censors, was initially given 67,000 screenings, but that total was trimmed by 10,000 screenings on each of the following days, and its score slipstreamed. It finished the weekend with $9.93 million.
Hong Kong-Chinese crime action film, “Paradox” took $6.23 million in its second weekend. After 11 days it has a $66.1 million total.
“Twenty-Two,” the award-winning documentary about wartime sex slaves, took seventh place with $1.01 million. After 14 days in cinemas it has a $24.5 million cumulative.
“Seer Movie 6: Invincible Puni” took $840,000 and eighth place in its second weekend. That extended its total to $14 million after ten days.
Chinese suspense action film “Guilty of Mind” took $640,000 and ninth place. It has $42.3 million after 17 days.
BBC documentary, “Earth: One Amazing Day” took tenth place with $490,000 and extended its cumulative to $6.2 million after 17 days.
Source: Variety by Patrick Frater
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Cast of Never Say Die hold press conference
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Singer Leah Dou poses for the fashion magazine
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Actress Chun Xia poses for fashion magazine
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Zhao Wei at promo event
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Kan Qingzi poses for fashion magazine
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Kevin Kwan: Americans will embrace ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ movie
The Singaporean novelist was in Hong Kong recently to promote “Rich People Problems,” the third and last book in his “Crazy Rich” trilogy.
His first book, “Crazy Rich Asians,” released in 2013, is the story of an Asian-American girl, Rachel, accompanying her boyfriend, Nick, to Singapore for a wedding, only to learn about Nick’s family wealth and power after stepping off the plane. The book provides a glimpse into the decadent and opulent lives of Asia’s ultra-rich. Its popularity gave birth to a sequel, “China Rich Girlfriends.”
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to notice the success of Kwan’s books and buy the rights to make “Crazy Rich Asians” into a film.
Kwan served as an executive producer on the “Crazy Rich Asians” movie, and said it was a long time coming for Hollywood to make a romantic comedy with an all-Asian cast.
“I think it’s huge,” he said. “It’s really the first time. ... I’m sorry it hasn’t happened earlier.”
“People are really eager to see if Hollywood keeps its promise and rolls out this movie the way we want it to,” he said.
Hollywood came under heavy criticism for so-called “white-washing” last year when Tilda Swinton was cast as a character that was originally Tibetan in “Doctor Strange” and Scarlett Johansson played the cyborg protagonist in the Japanese anime remake “Ghost in the Shell.” More recently, British actor Ed Skrein was cast as a Japanese-American character in a reboot of “Hellboy.” After a backlash, Skrein announced that he had withdrawn from the film.
Kwan said that for “Crazy Rich Asians,” he and the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, insisted on an all-Asian cast.
“It’s really been a dream come true, you know,” Kwan said. “Because even from the very start, when Hollywood was first interested in adopting it, I was thinking, Michelle Yeoh would be perfect, Constance Wu would be perfect. All these people, the fact that the dream sort of all came together.”
Wu, the breakout star from the sitcom “Fresh off the Boat,” plays the unassuming Rachel, while Yeoh plays her boyfriend’s disapproving mother. The dashing, rich Nick is played by newcomer Henry Golding. Others in the cast include “Hangover” star Ken Jeong and Harry Shum Jr. from “Glee.”
With racial tensions on the rise in the United States, Kwan said he remains confident that Americans will embrace “Crazy Rich Asians.”
“They have a history of multiculturalism in the industry, but over the last few years, it’s really, I think, the corporatization of Hollywood, the fact that it’s owned by these big huge corporations, where they just want to see profit, profit, profit,” Kwan said. “They take a lot less risks and a lot less artistic risks. But I think that’s changing, it really is, because the audience is demanding it, not just the Asian audience, the American, white audience is demanding it.”
When asked if his “Crazy Rich” trilogy glorifies the lives of the top 1 percent in Asia, Kwan’s answer was a definitive “No.”
“My books are satires, you know, they are really comedies of manners,” he said. “So I think most of my readers, when they read it, I don’t think they’re really seeing this world through these rosy lenses.
They’re seeing the problems these rich people have. In a way, that’s why I named the third book ‘Rich People Problems.’”
“Rich People Problems” is available at bookstores now, and the “Crazy Rich Asians” movie is in post-production and slated for release in 2018.
Source: Associated Press by Angela Chen
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Human acts apes in "War for the Planet of the Apes"
(China Plus) "War for the Planet of the Apes", a Hollywood summer blockbuster, will be released in China in mid-September.
Before the film's arrival in Chinese theatres, Weta Digital Visual Effects Supervisor Anders Langlands recently visited Beijing, sharing the secrets of how his team made the stunning scenes based on their visits to a local zoo.
"For the motion to be believable, we also need to simulate dynamics. The muscles in the flex and jiggle under tension, skin on fat slide around over it and then the fur blows around in the wind. We like to simulate all of these processes from inside out. We're lucky enough to have very good relationship with Wellington Zoo, where key chimpanzees, they became to share their MRI scan data with us. And we can use that to build a 3D model of the inside of a chimpanzee. And this tells us all about the position, the size and the density of the muscles, it tells us where they attach the bone with the ligaments, and it helps us figure out how everything articulates together."
In the movie, real actors step into the roles of apes.
There are 1,440 visual effects shots in "War for the Planet of the Apes" representing 95 percent of the total shots of the movie.
Langlands has credits in many major blockbusters including "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" and "Clash of the Titans."
His work on "X-Men: Days of Future Past" earned him a BAFTA nomination, and in 2016 he was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards for his work on "The Martian."
"War for the Planet of the Apes" is due for release in China on September 15th.
Source: China Plus by Xu Fei
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Cast of "Youth" hold press conference
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Fan Bingbing and Gao Yunxiang in “Win The World”
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Street shots of Wang Luodan
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Song Zuer poses for fashion magazine
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The dedicated fans translating Game of Thrones into Chinese
(SCMP) An hour after the season finale of hit television drama Game of Thrones aired on HBO on Monday, 10 young Chinese meet online – as they have done every Monday since mid-July.
It’s 10am, and for the next six hours they have a job to do: translating the show’s dialogue into Putonghua, based on the original episode and its English subtitles.
The group members are based in Chinese cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Xian, but also in Pittsburgh in the United States and Manchester in Britain.
They work together on a cloud-based interface called Shimo Docs. Six of them do the translating, three proofread and a team leader does the final check.
In the ‘Game of Thrones’ finale, a negotiation technique becomes a game-changer.
By 4pm, the subtitles – in simplified characters – are ready to go into a file format known as Advanced SubStation Alpha before they are published on one of China’s biggest subtitle sharing websites, SubHD.
Waiting for the translation are Chinese fans of the show who don’t want to pay to watch the latest episode with official Putonghua subtitles on Tencent, HBO’s exclusive online partner in China.
They can access the subtitles themselves or via a video sharing website. The practice is illegal, but despite crackdowns by the authorities in recent years, it hasn’t been stopped.
Members of the Yigui subtitling team do not get paid for this service – they are all fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin that Game of Thrones is based on.
It is one of many so-called fansubbing – or fan-subtitling – groups on mainland China, where pirated films and television series are still commonly watched.
Achilles Chen, one of the team’s two leaders who is based in Guangzhou, said it was Martin’s books that first brought them together in 2011.
“As fans of the novel [who met] on Baidu Tieba [a communication platform run by Chinese search giant Baidu], we were very excited that a television series had been produced based on the book. But we found that many of the Chinese subtitles didn’t work so well – mainly because the translators hadn’t read the books,” said Chen, who is known online as Shizi.
They weren’t the only ones who were disappointed. As a result, Qu Chang, who was one of the Chinese translators of Martin’s first five books, began translating the television subtitles for fans of the show.
But Qu was doing the translations in his own time, and it was hard to keep on top of it on his own, Chen said. That’s when some of the fans from Tieba joined in.
Qu is now an adviser to Yigui, and the fansubbing team continues to grow.
It’s a big task – each episode has 400 to 700 lines, depending on the length of the fight scenes, and the translations have become more difficult in recent seasons, Chen said.
“The earlier seasons were closer to the novel, so four translators were enough,” he said. “Now we have six.”
Chen has been part of the group since the first season, and he has seen many volunteers with varied backgrounds come and go over the years.
“We are all normal people with our own jobs and lives. We do it for free,” he said.
A former Yigui member who declined to be named said fansubbing groups in China generally specialised in one area. Some translated a variety of films and TV series, others focused on a particular genre or actor, while others focused on classics, documentaries or minority languages, she said.
Like most of them, Yigui has remained non-profit. But one thing that sets it apart is that its sole focus is the Game of Thrones series.
Tencent had approached the group in the past to work with it, according to the former member, but the negotiations went nowhere.
“They offered us a paltry 200 yuan to 300 yuan (US$30 to US$45) per episode. We may as well have been [working for Tencent] for free,” said the fansubber, who worked on the Putonghua translations of two seasons of the show.
For now, the group intends to carry on producing the subtitles on a voluntary basis. Chen said he could not see any possibility of Yigui entering into a commercial partnership in the short term.
“The best thing for a subtitling team is to be purchased by an official producer or its partner, but it needs to be a good price and good timing,” he said.
Source: South China Morning Post by Mandy Zuo
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‘Unlocked’ Scores September 22 Release Date for China
(CFI) ‘Unlocked’, the Lionsgate CIA conspiracy thriller that sees London at risk of a biological attack, has scored a September 22 release date for China.
Geopolitical thrillers that depict Western countries as fraught and dangerous places have found it easier to secure slots in China’s restricted film market.
Films like Deepwater Horizon, which depicts the deadly 2010 explosion of the BP-operated, offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 and caused millions of gallons of oil to spill, Patriot’s Day, which centers on the events of the 2013 bombings at the annual Boston Marathon and its aftermath, and Bastille Day, which is about a terror attack in France, have all been given covered slots over the past year in China.
Directed by Michael Apted, ‘Unlocked’ stars Noomi Rapace, John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas and Orlando Bloom.
The film centers on a CIA interrogator (Rapace), who unwittingly provides information to terrorists and then must race against the clock to stop a biological warfare attack on London.
It was released in the United Kingdom on May 5 by Lionsgate.
Source: China Film Insider by Fergus Ryan
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Stills of Angelababy and Huang Xuan in Entrepreneurial Age
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Qin Lan poses for photo shoot
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Guo Biting poses for photo shoot
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Chinese Box Office Smash Hit ‘Wolf Warriors’ Set To Become TV Show
(CFI) Wolf Warriors II (战狼II) rode a wave of patriotic fervor to become the second film in history to reach $800 million in a single territory over the weekend, and now it’s heading for the small screen.
The 2006 military novel that inspired the Chinese box office hit will be adapted into a new TV series, the film’s executive producer Han Hao confirmed this week.
“A deal was made last year for the IP of the novel, so the show is a certainty,” Han said in an interview with the Yangtse Evening Post on Monday.
Dan Hen (弹痕), which translates as “Bullet Hole”, is a hit online novel by writer Dong Qun which he wrote under the pseudonym Fen Wu Yao Ji. Originally published on literature site Qidian Chinese, the novel has garnered a cult following since it was first published in 2006. Dong Fun later became the main scriptwriter for Wolf Warriors II, which is based on his work.
Wolf Warriors II, the second installment of the Wolf Warriors series, became the second film in history to reach US$800 million in box office in a single territory. It is the only non-English film to make it to the top 100 across the globe.
The film tells the story of a Chinese special forces operative who takes on missions around the world and finds himself in the midst of an African coup against vicious foreign mercenaries.
Han told the Yangtse Evening Post that the TV show will need to distinguish itself from similar shows that are already flooding the Chinese entertainment market. “It will need to be different,” he said.
Filming for the show is set to kick off next year, but casting is already under way. Wu Jing, the lead actor, and director of the Wolf Warriors movies will not take part in the TV series.
Source: China Film Insider by Fergus Ryan
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Warner Bros.' Korean Thriller 'V.I.P' Sells Across Asia
(THR) V.I.P., the latest title by Warner Bros. Local Productions Korea, sold to multiple Asian territories, Seoul-based sales company Finecut announced on Thursday.
The crime thriller has been picked up by The Klockworx for Japan; Neofilm for Hong Kong and Macau; Moviecloud for Taiwan; Viva Communications for the Philippines; and CJ E&M Hong Kong for Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Thailand.
At home,V.I.P. had an impressive opening score. It topped the South Korean box office over the weekend of Aug. 25-27, earning a cume $9 million as of Thursday. The film scored over 1 million admissions in just eight days. South Korean industry observers primarily measure a film's box-office performance by admissions.
Starring A-listers Jang Dong-gun (My Way), Kim Myung-min (A Day), Park Heui-soon (The Age of Shadows), and Lee Jong-suk (The Face Reader), the crime drama is about a South Korean intelligence agent, police detective and a North Korean officer colliding in their efforts to capture a North Korean defector, the son of a key political figure who turns out to be a prime suspect of a serial murder case.
V.I.P.is helmed by one of the South Korea's most sought-out directors, Park Hoon-jung, who enjoyed both critical and popular acclaim for the noir New World. He previously penned the scripts for successful titles The Unjust and I Saw the Devil.
The film is presented by Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Gold Moon Film and co-produced by peppermint&company, Inc.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter by Lee Hyo-won
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