Jiang Wen’s ‘Hidden Man’ spearheads China’s box office summer offerings
BEIJING: Award-winning director Jiang Wen’s Hidden Man spearheads China’s summer offerings at the box office.
Also highly touted for the month of July are L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties directed by Guo Jingming, Drug Dealer ( Xu Zheng), and Xu Ke’s action movie Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings.
In August, the debut film directed by actor Huang Bo will be shown. Moreover, Zhang Yimou’s latest film Shadow is also expected to bow in.
The overall quality of this year’s summer films is expected to be excellent.
Imported Hollywood movies will hit the cinema in June, while in July and August, Chinamade films will overwhelmingly dominate the cinemas due to the annual summer blackout period.
This month, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Incredibles 2, and Escape Plan 2: Hades will be released sequentially.
Consummate director Jiang has had a career that lurched from being banned for his Devils on the Doorstep directorial effort, through to being one of China’s most celebrated actor- directors. Hidden Man is pitched as the third element in a loose trilogy that stared with Let The Bullets Fly and continued with Gone With The Bullets. Both mix up old time gangsters, decadent high life, and power grabs, throwing up political analogies that Chinese censors were expected to OK and audiences were supposed to read between the lines.
Acclaimed director Zhang Yimou ( The Great Wall, House of the Flying Daggers, Hero) is currently putting finishing touches on his latest martial arts epic, Shadow.
The film, which takes places during the Three Kingdoms era, stars Leo Wu, Ryan Zheng, Deng Chao, Sun Li, Wang Qianyuan and Hu Jun.
Shadow is a co-venture between Village Roadshow Pictures Asia and Le Vision Pictures, for which Zhang is retained as an artistic consultant.