Box Office: ‘F9’ Falls 85% In China, Drops 52% Elsewhere
Justin Lin’s F9 took a brutal tumble in China but essentially held up in its other hold-over markets. The film earned $20.76 million in China this weekend, a drop of 85% from last weekend’s $136 million launch. However, the Vin Diesel/John Cena film’s sharp decline in China has little-to-nothing to do with the controversy concerning Cena walking back the offhand declaration of Taiwan being a country. Fate of the Furious, which Chinese audiences liked more than F9, dropped 70% from its $185 million debut in early 2017 while Hobbs & Shaw dropped 72% in 2019. China is generally a market, in terms of Hollywood biggies, where the films earn around 2x or 2.25x their respective opening weekends. Read more Forbes
‘Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue’ Review: China Through Writers’ Eyes
Jia Zhangke’s documentary illuminates a vast and complicated history in a series of intimate conversations. The films of Jia Zhangke, documentary and fictional, zoom in on the granular details of individual lives. At the same time, they are chapters in the single, unimaginably complicated story of China’s transformation in the decades since the 1949 revolution. Jia, who was born in 1970, tends to dwell in the recent past, and to circle back to Shanxi, the part of northern China where he grew up, but he’s also attentive to the continuities of history and geography, the connections between generations and places. Read more NY Times
