- The Legend of 1900 is taking more at the box office than the latest international and domestic blockbusters
- An appetite for enhanced editions and 3D might have something to do with the surprise success of Giuseppe Tournatore’s forgotten flick
(8.5), Frozen II (7.3) and Midway (7.7), local blockbusters such as Better Days (8.4), or any of the flag-waving tub-thumpers that dominated Chinese cineplexes for weeks before and after National Day.
The success of Legend could in part be attributed to young mainlanders’ pursuit of novelty: China is one of the few markets where 3D films, complete with their marked-up ticket prices, remain popular.
Chinese audiences have also embraced old films like never before, flocking to movies they could only hear or read about, or watch on pirated discs while the country lagged behind the rest of the world in the number of screens and foreign titles that could be shown on them.
There has also been a surge of interest in re-evaluating film heritage with festivals placing emphasis on introducing painstakingly restored films to viewers. In October, for example, the Pingyao International Film Festival hosted a programme of rarely seen titles from India’s socially conscious Parallel Cinema movement. The recent Hainan International Film Festival presented a more diverse offering, including classics such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte(1955) and Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer (2009).
It is in such programmes that legends are made and the old becomes the new.
Source: SCMP
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