No one's safe from the Avatar fever - Mud sculptures by Chinese artists
My geeky friends were stomping their feets like 3 yrs olds in front of the ice cream machine a couple months before its release. Every week, I’d hear stuff about this upcoming movie. Did I say movie? Thousands of people involved in the project. 20th Century Fox, Ubisoft, James Cameron…sorry it’s not a movie, it’s an “experrrience”. Whatever.
Worlwide release on Dec 18th. Golden Globe for Best Picture since and still dominating worldwide box office. Avatar, behind its “save the environment” message is making cash. Loads of it. 3-D showings have brought in $1.35 billion of the film’s total gross and predicted to gross at least $2.2 billion by the time it’s over. Can you hear Leo screaming “I am the King of the World”? That’s James Cameron now. And that ship ain’t sinking…
In mainland China, Avatar has earned RMB680 million (US$100 million) at the box office since it opened on January 4 (the run was allegedly delayed for Bodyguards & Assassins). The distributor China Film Group (CFG) also predicts that the box office takings will reach RMB800 million (US$117.13 million) by the time it finishes screening in Chinese cinemas.
But hey, China is not like anywhere else. On her early journey to Pandora, my friend (the geeky one with an even more geeky and brilliant boyfriend who designed my logos) went naively to the only IMAX 3D movie theatre in Shanghai, the Peace Cinema 和平影都...In fact of peaceful, people were lining up for a couple blocks and some were even fighting to get in to see Avatar, 阿凡达…
They went back home and tried to find a solution on Internet but only to find a raging war there too: the price had reached 18O RMB and only lowered again to 150 RMB after online protestation. Getting a ticket was Mission Impossible and paying 400 RMB to scalpers, well, pretty much out of the question.
This is how much people here were starving for this kind of entertainment.
Facing that unsual enthusiasm – and for a foreign movie, that is, the SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) decided it was about time to take off Avatar from all 2D cinemas : this basically means stopping the screenings. Rumor has it the mega-hit had been ordered to stop to make way for Confucius, that masterpiece with Chow Yun Fat…
This weekend, the IMAX bookings for Avatar were still full in Shanghai. Perhaps people should go to Hunan instead. Over there, they have the Avatar’s Hallelujah mountain in the real life. A tribute to Cameron’s sensational contribution to the world and a noticeable attempt to boost the area’s tourism, the mountain “South Pillar of Heaven” 南天一柱 was renamed “Hallelujah Mountain”.
The moral of the story : a Chinese Rock star is born..haha
