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As we approach its second weekend, "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" should be well below the box office performance of the first installment of the franchise in China, despite several over-loved attempts to seduce the Chinese audience .
Friday afternoon, six days after its release, Grindelwald had reported about $ 46.3 million on the world's second largest film market. He was beaten at the box office on Wednesday and Thursday by "Venom" and the Chinese crime thriller "A Cool Fish", then dropped even further, to fifth place, at 15 o'clock. Friday, muscled by the new releases "Ralph Breaks the Internet" and "Johnny English Strikes Again" with Rowan Atkinson, who has huge popularity in China.
"The fantastic beasts and where to find them" in 2016 brought in $ 86 million in China, almost double the sequel, at a time when the country had far fewer screens than today. hui. On Wednesday and Thursday, "Grindelwald" recorded about 70,000 screenings a day.
J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World remains extremely popular in the Middle Kingdom, where more people will probably recognize Harry Potter as an emissary of British culture. On Douban, a key site of Chinese user reviews, some 127,000 critics gave Grindelwald a respectable rating of 7.2, but many complained that the story was too complicated, a widespread criticism also of Western critics.
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"A payment totally adapted to the following; it was much too boring and the emotional scenes were clumsy and wooden, "said one of the most popular reviews of Douban, which only gave him two stars. "The beast show was not as rich or interesting as in the first one."
Another three-star review warned: "The threshold to enter is very high – the non-fans will be totally lost and the plot is too complicated. But the special effects were very good and the decorations very cool. "
The film did not really hit the audience despite the introduction of a Chinese "fantastic beast": the zouwu, based on an obscure creature mentioned in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", a ancient Chinese text that is full of myths and mythical geography. thought to date back to the 4th century BC
"That's how this is described in Chinese mythology: gigantic cat the size of an elephant, five colors. It really takes a Newt Scamander to contain and heal this beast, "said Rowling in a promotional video for" Grindelwald ". She added, "There is a Chinese bestiary that absolutely fascinates. "
The original classic text briefly mentions Zouwu in these terms: "In Lin's Land, there are rare animals. Big as a tiger, with a multicolored body and a tail longer than his body, his name is Zouwu, and by riding, you can earn a mile, an old unit of measure a third of a mile.
Chinese fans were charmed by the Hollywood version of this fantastic cat. Some even claimed that they found it so cute that they had discovered dusty copies of the classic text to find the reference. Many have noted the irony of Hollywood on a cultural element that even most Chinese people did not know, with a user on Weibo, the Twitter account of China, which writes, "Our ancestors have left us many good things that we have never fully exploited. use of – damage! "
The "Grindelwald" marketing campaign also touched the Chinese public with a magnificent Chinese-specific poster: a Chinese zouwu brush painting and other tree-perched creatures, made with the known "gongbi" technique for its very precise features, realism. It was presented at the premiere of the film in Beijing, on a seven-panel screen. The artist, Zhang Chun, also created brush portraits of six creatures for the first film, which became viral in China.
Some Western fans have discussed the possibility that the zouwu carries the "Beasts" franchise in China. In the first film, a creature whose French name is Demiguise played a leading role. The following film takes place in Paris.
Patrick Frater contributed to this report.
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