China Box Office: ‘Ne Zha 2' Leads Again, as New Releases Make Modest Debuts
'Ne Zha 2' earned RMB85.7 million ($11.9 million) over the weekend, bringing its cumulative total to $2.081 billion, according to Artisan Gateway. In its eighth week, the animated blockbuster continues to captivate audiences. In Imax, 'Ne Zha 2' added $1.8 million globally, a 41% drop from the previous weekend, increasing its global cume in the format to $158.2 million, with $154 million from China alone.
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China's Overdue Animation Explosion Ignited by the Local and Global Success of 'Ne Zha 2'
Chinese Animation Powers Imax Growth as 'Ne Zha 2' Redefines Box Office Potential
Hanna Pictures' 'The River of Fury' debuted in second place with $2 million. Directed by Feng Yongqin, the film is a crime thriller where the mysterious disappearance of a woman is related to a series of murders.
'Detective Chinatown 1900', from As One Production, continued its strong performance, securing third place with $1.9 million. The film's cumulative gross now stands at $492.1 million.
Lian Ray Pictures' 'New Life' opened in fourth place, earning $1.7 million. Directed by Dong Hongjie, the drama follows a lonely worker who befriends a stray dog.
Rounding out the top five, Cinema City (HK)'s re-release of the restored version of the Tsui Hark-produced supernatural romance, 1987 classic 'A Chinese Ghost Story,' earned $1.4 million.
The weekend's total box office reached $24.5 million, a decrease from the previous weekend's $36.1 million. Nevertheless, China's 2025 gross-to-date stands at $3.36 billion, a 53.7% increase over the same period in 2024, highlighting the market's resilience despite a quieter release slate post the bumper Lunar New Year period.
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CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
'Superman,' 'F1' both cross $500 million at the global box office
Warner Bros. Discovery had a bountiful weekend at the global box office. The studio had two films cross the $500 million mark worldwide — "Superman" soared to $502 million and Apple's "F1," which Warner Bros. distributed, topped $509 million in ticket sales. The benchmark is a boon for Warner Bros.' DC Studios, as "Superman" is the first theatrical debut of James Gunn and Peter Safran since they became co-heads of the film and TV unit in late 2022. The pair has developed a 10-year plan to reinvigorate the studio's franchises across TV and film, including fresh spins on Superman and Batman. At present, 2025's "Superman" is the fourth-highest-grossing film featuring Superman. Zack Snyder's 2016 "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" is the highest with $874 million in global ticket sales, while 2013's "Man of Steel" is second-highest with $669 million and 2017's "Justice League" with $661 million, according to data from Comscore. "Superman" debuted in theaters just two weeks ago and continues to drive weekend moviegoing as well as weekday trips. As for Apple's "F1," passing the $500 million mark is just another feather in the cap for the studio. Earlier this month, the film became Apple's best film release ever, surpassing Ridley Scott's "Napoleon," which generated $221 million during its 2023 run, to become Apple's then-highest-grossing theatrical release. The tech company has only sent a handful of films to cinemas with wide releases since delving into the media business in recent years. "Killers of the Flower Moon" tallied $158 million worldwide, "Fly Me to the Moon" took in just $42 million and "Argylle" generated $96 million in ticket sales globally. "F1" has benefited greatly from its partnership with IMAX. Before production, Apple and the film's top creatives reached out to not only secure the use of IMAX's camera technology but also a three-week release in its theaters.


USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
Just how did 'Wizard of Oz' at Sphere Las Vegas take Dorothy from 2D to 4D?
LAS VEGAS – In a month, the Las Vegas Sphere will be turned into the verdant splendor of Emerald City. And the vibrant mosaic of Munchkinland. And the dusty amber plains of Kansas. It's 'The Wizard of Oz' not just as a film, but an experience. A place where the 160,000 square feet of Sphere screen transports you into Dorothy Gale's world and, through the use of 4D and haptics, immerses you in the feeling of being inside a tornado and makes you cower at the sight of those dastardly flying monkeys heading from the Wicked Witch's lair to your seat. The film, which opens Aug. 28 at the technologically sophisticated venue just off the Las Vegas Strip, was chosen for Sphere-i-fication because of its generation-spanning appeal. 'It's a movie that your mother watched, that you watched with your grandmother or your kids,' says Jane Rosenthal, the Oscar-nominated producer helping helm the production. 'The movie became so beloved because you felt you could go into Munchkinland or the Emerald City even in a traditional TV format. It's a natural for the Sphere because of the elements that can be made immersive.' The Sphere's film has been in development for two years with a team of more than 2,000 filmmakers, technicians, audio experts and AI creatives working to transform Oz from a 2D world into an extraordinary envelopment of sight and sound. Las Vegas Sphere concerts: All the bands that are playing and how to get tickets Why the Sphere's 'Wizard of Oz' is an unparalleled experience Those involved with 'Oz' wouldn't confirm the $80 million price tag alluded to when the project was announced in August 2024. But, from the near-final pieces of the film USA TODAY observed in July, it's evident this has been an exhaustive, finely detailed endeavor. From the clarity of Judy Garland's doe eyes with eyelashes that can be counted to the 16-foot-long helium-filled monkeys steered by drone operators, it's sheer wonderment. And the tornado? You'll find yourself ducking in your seat at what feels like farm equipment and animals flying toward you as 750-horsepower fans built specifically for "Oz" hurl wind and (paper) leaves around the venue. To assume the film is merely glorified IMAX is akin to saying earbuds provide the same sound quality as $16,000 studio headphones. The $104 admission likely seems steep, but not as much after you factor in the cutting-edge experience and the Vegas location. How 'ethical AI' transformed 'The Wizard of Oz' at the Sphere The Sphere team worked closely with Warner Bros. and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to mine the 'Oz' archives from its original 1939 form. Transforming what was filmed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard-sized movie screen to the 16K x 16K LED screen resolution of the Sphere required the use of what Rosenthal calls 'ethical AI.' The time required to convert the film also necessitated editing from its original run time of 102 minutes to 75. The artificial intelligence in 'Oz' was primarily used to extend frames to fill the Sphere screen. Rosenthal gives the example of an early scene when irritable neighbor Miss Gulch wants to take Toto – himself given a furry glow-up – from the Gale home. 'That was originally a three-shot, but as you widen the frame, you now see Uncle Henry standing by the door. You train the AI on Uncle Henry to create him making a move like putting his hand on the door,' she says. 'That stuff was difficult to do.' The Sphere team, with the aid of Warner Bros., found props and set designs from the original movie so objects such as photos on the wall in Professor Marvel's caravan could be generated onto the screen. Every frame of the film takes 300 hours (12.5 days) to render. An edit of a few seconds might take days to fix. And then there is the equilibrium between respecting a classic and elevating it to immersive heights. Award-winning technician Glenn Derry, the executive vice president of MSG Ventures, spent thousands of hours refining minutiae such as the breathtaking moment when Dorothy awakens in her sepia-toned heartland and steps into Technicolor Munchkinland, the yellow brick road seemingly stretching into space. 'We're trying to be tasteful with these things,' Derry says. 'I don't want to distract from the film because it's one of the great masterpieces. You want people to be part of it, but balance that with not being distracting.' Emotion and revelations and nostalgia, oh my So while the cranky apple tree will hurl featherweight red orbs at Sphere "Oz" viewers, and seats will vibrate with ominous warnings of the Wicked Witch or hopeful spasms when Glinda the Good Witch soars inside her pink bubble, the heart of 'Oz' – as the Tin Man would appreciate – is intact. Derry says his favorite effect is the hulking Wizard head, which almost sneaks in from the side of the screen while pyro is dispatched in front of it. 'It's a nostalgic thing for me,' Derry, whose father worked in the industry as a machinist and physical effects expert, says. 'I love the elements that you don't notice and then you turn and are surprised.' The revelations will begin as soon as moviegoers step into the atrium of the venue, which will be converted to an Oz-like atmosphere with interactive elements (that Wizard head might have another role along with booming on screen). It's an experience that simply cannot be duplicated. 'With the emotion of 'there's no place like home' and 'Over the Rainbow,' I feel fortunate to bring this movie to life,' Rosenthal says. 'A venue like Sphere makes you want to keep going to the movies.'


Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Only one -- the prototype -- was ever made. Advertisement 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Mullaney's mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything. Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language -- around 100,000, by some estimates -- there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost. Advertisement Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole. It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter? Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor's take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable -- a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology. Mullaney was fascinated. That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise. He cold-called strangers and left voicemail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, 'Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?' Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Mullaney said, Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet. He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to 'clear and fast.' Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer. Advertisement It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn. And that, as far as Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine's last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared. In his 2017 book, 'The Chinese Typewriter,' Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrap heap. This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Felix's father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. 'What's this?' Jennifer Felix asked her husband. He'd had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it's that typewriter. She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Nelson Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called 'What's My Typewriter Worth?' and posted some photos. Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Nelson Felix checked on his post. There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom. The couple looked at each other. 'Who's Tom?' Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off -- ping, ping, ping. The small community of people he'd encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention. As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai. Advertisement But he didn't rejoice. He didn't sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear. What if they didn't know what they had and sold it before he could get to it? Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that. He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in