Tycoon's son blasts 'Gone with the Bullets'
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, December 26, 2014
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A poster of "Gone With the Bullets" [Photo/Mtime.com] |
"I suggest that the production studios later add a line before the movie screening that says, 'The bad reviews for this film are unacceptable,'" he added.
Thus far, the three posts have been retweeted more than 82,100 times and have received more than 100,000 comments and 252,000 likes.
Interestingly, Wanda's film division, Wanda Media Co. Ltd., is one of the producers for "Gone with the Bullets." According to the industry rumor mill, Wanda Cinema also has a contract with the "Gone with the Bullets" team promising to arrange overwhelming time slots in their chain of theaters to make sure the film surpasses the 1 billion yuan (US$161 million) mark at box offices. Some industry observers speculated that Wang's words were actually an expression of disappointment in the film's performance and Wanda's involvement.
"Gone with the Bullets" has been a huge disappointment across the board, especially since its directors and producers had expected 2 billion yuan (US$322.2 million) in box office sales to make the film the top-grossing Chinese movie ever. Although some critics applauded the film as a good art house film filled with ideas and vision, most average moviegoers hated it and even branded it as "rubbish."
The movie and its release plan were ambitious. On the day the film debuted, show times for "Gone with the Bullets" took up 53.21 percent of the Chinese market, amounting to the widest release in Chinese history. But sadly, this is the only record the film has set. The gross of its midnight screenings was around 17.85 million yuan, according to optimistic estimates published in a news release from Jiang Wen's work studio. However, the official statistics for its midnight showing revenues from China's film bureau turned out to total only 6.8 million yuan.
When waves and waves of criticism followed and many audience members stood up and walked out of theaters halfway through screenings around the nation, the film's team tried very hard to turn things around. They collected good reviews online to explain what this movie is all about, and Jiang Wen himself argued in an interview, blaming some viewers and critics for not understanding his vision. The distributors of the film even produced a 2D version of the film for further screenings after some complained the film does not need to be presented in 3D.
Though the film has grossed 420 million yuan (US$67.65 million) so far, the dominant share of show times it once enjoyed in China had stunningly and embarrassingly dropped to just 15.39 percent by Dec. 26, just a week after its release, according to entertainment research center EntGroup. This means there's no hope for the film to gross anywhere near 1 billion yuan. Some observers have re-projected the total gross of "Gone with the Bullets" to be around 700 million yuan. Considering the film's 300 million yuan budget, it's a big failure, and its investors will lose money. Theater managers have now turned to Tsui Hark's "The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D" as the new savior of the lukewarm New Year season.
But with only a few days left before 2015, China's 2014 film industry target of 30 billion yuan (US$4.82 billion) may eventually fail to be realized due to the disappointing failure of "Bullets." The box office gross of all screening films on Christmas Eve, which was 119 million yuan, made theater managers even more frustrated since the data showed little difference from the same day the previous year, even though the number of screens in China has increased by more than 5,000 since then.
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