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Don’t confuse this movie with “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” directed by Guo Jingming, although they’re both adapted from the same Japanese novel series “Onmyoji” written by Baku Yumemakura. This novel was so popular that the Chinese game developer NetEase Games decided to further adapt it into “Onmyoji”, a 3D role-playing video game set in Japan and it also became a massive hit. An adaptation of this video game into a feature was soon on the drawing board resulting in “The Yinyang Master”, nonetheless, with collaboration between the Huayi Brothers Media, Ckf Pictures and NetEase Games.

In the fantasy world of ancient China, humans and demons live in harmony until Xiang Liu, an evil demon emperor, a serpent with nine heads decides to take control. However, the humans manage to defeat him and all demons are driven out to live in the Monster Realm while humans remain in Ping Jing city.

Beijing-based sales agency is also handling war epic Sacrifice and Vincent Zhao’s Counter Attack.

Beijing-based sales agency Blossoms Entertainment is launches sales on three new productions from leading Chinese studio Huayi Brothers at Filmart Online, headed by historical war epic Railway Heroes.

Starring Zhang Hanyu (Operation Red Sea) and Fan Wei (One Second), the film follows a group of Chinese railway workers during the Sino-Japanese War, who attempt to sabotage the enemy’s vital transport links whilst evading arrest. The film, directed by Yang Feng, is currently in production for release over China’s National Day Holidays in October.

Chinese indie sales agency Blossoms Entertainment returns to FilMart with a slate of large-scale commercial pictures sourced from a clutch of China’s biggest film studios.

The agency, operated by former Im Global staffers Vicky Ding and Leslie Chen, is pre-selling “Railway Heroes,” a tale of heroism and wartime sabotage which is targeting a National Day release in October. The film is directed by Yang Feng with a cast headed by Zhang Hanyu and Fan Wei.

“Never Stop,” a sports drama about the careers of two sprinters, is poised to release in China around the time of the Tokyo Olympics this summer. The cast is headed by “Shadow” star Zheng Kai (aka Ryan Zheng), with direction by Han Bowen.

Leste Chen’s “Upcoming” (aka “Sheng Xia Wei Lai”) marks the “Eternal Summer” director’s return to the romantic coming of age genre after more recent efforts in other directions including...

“Tom and Jerry” squeaked in a narrow fifth in China with a $12.4 million debut, failing to capture viewers still flocking to local Chinese New Year holdover titles over the Lantern Festival holiday weekend.

The Warner Bros. hybrid animated live-actioner skittered into the world’s largest film market with just $8,000 less than its closest competitor, the fourth place local fantasy adventure “A Writer’s Odyssey,” which earned around $12.4 million as well.

It fell, however, further behind the Chinese New Year frontrunners “Hi, Mom,” “Detective Chinatown 3” and “Endgame,” which came in first through third with $53.3 million, $19.7 million and $14.5 million, respectively.

China sales for “Tom and Jerry” were just a hair below the film’s $13.7 million North American debut. That opener marked one of the biggest domestic debut weekends for a film since the pandemic began, since no other film in the past 10 months has hit above the $10 million-mark Stateside.

Yet while $13.7 million...

The streaming wars are just as fiery and competitive as ever. Disney+ now has one Marvel TV show under its belt (WandaVision), with another one to come in March (The Falcon and The Winter Soldier). In response, Netflix is broadening its reach with its list of new releases for March 2021.

Netflix always features plenty of international options for viewers across the globe, but March is the first month where it seems as though international releases make up roughly half of Netflix’s originals. And that’s great! China’s The Yin Yang Master and Spain’s Coven of Sisters both look to be intriguing films this month.

Read more Movies Pacific Rim 3 and Expanded Universe Possible By Don Kaye TV Best Anime On Netflix to Stream By Daniel Kurland

On the U.S. domestic side of things, however, pickings are bit slimmer. March 3 sees the release of the intensely American-sounding...

More than 35,300 suspected links to pirated versions of Chinese New Year’s films and major holiday TV programs are available online, despite government directives to crack down on piracy, new data from China shows.

Rampant piracy did not stop the seven new year’s blockbusters released on Feb. 12 from sending China’s February box office soaring to new heights of $1.74 billion and counting. But it has likely nonetheless caused significant losses for the country’s exhibitors, already hard hit by the pandemic over the past year.

Around 26,900 of the reported links lead users to pirated versions of four of the new year’s tentpoles, according to a report from the government-affiliated 12426 Copyright Monitoring Center, which has ties to the central propaganda bureau-backed Copyright Society of China, a professional association. A further 5,000 links led to key TV extravaganzas like the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

The tally of links is currently...

The Chinese New Year box office achieved yet another milestone Wednesday, with grosses for the holiday period growing to an estimated Rmb 7.78 billion ($1.2 billion). This beats the previous all-time high set during the comparable 2019 holiday (Rmb 5.9B). China often outdoes itself, but the fact that 2021’s Lunar New Year frame came with Covid capacity restrictions makes the performance even more staggering.

Factors working in the session’s favor included a diverse slate of seven new local titles (including two powerhouses at the top), as well as increased ticket prices in some areas, additional screens versus 2019 and a reduction in travel which made moviegoing the first-choice activity for people who were not journeying to see family as would normally be the case during the holiday.

After setting new records for opening day and opening weekend in a single market (February 12-14), Wanda Pictures’ Detective Chinatown 3 has grossed Rmb 3.56B ($551 million) through Wednesday.

Global streaming platform Netflix has picked up international rights to mainland Chinese animated feature “New Gods: Nezha Reborn.” The Light Chaser Animation Studios title was one of the seven major titles to release last week in Chinese cinemas over the peak Lunar New Year holiday period.

The platform has exclusive worldwide streaming rights outside mainland China. It did not confirm a date for international availability.

Gross box office in mainland China reached RMB235 million ($36.4 million) after six days on release. Ticketing and data service Maoyan forecasts that it will eventually finish with a RMB407 million ($63 million) total.

“Nezha Reborn” is the third high profile commercial title picked up by Netflix in the past couple of months. Earlier, the platform licensed “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity,” a period fantasy action film by Guo Jingming which released on Dec. 25. It followed that with another of the Chinese New Year releases, “The Yin Yang Master,...

China’s box office is primed for a sparkling Lunar New Year frame as new titles start rollout on Friday. As we noted this past Sunday, pre-sales had alread begun to pop, with threequel Detective Chinatown 3 in the lead. The film from Chen Sicheng as of 11:30Pm local time on Thursday had hit over Rmb 673M ($104M) in advance tickets for opening day Friday and more than Rmb 950M ($147M) for the first week, according to Maoyan.

Those figures exceed the advance sales performance of Disney/Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame which itself was a record-breaker in April 2019. Endgame debuted on a Wednesday in China and its ultimate day-one gross, including midnights, was Rmb 725M ($107.8M at historical rates/$112.3M today) — the biggest opening day ever in the market. Stripping out the midnights on Endgame, its first day was Rmb 538M. For reference, Monster Hunt 2 kicked off the Lunar...

Based on the Japanese novel series “Onmyoji” by Baku Yumemakura, “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” is another link in the long chain of fantasy blockbusters that have been coming from China in the last couple of years, which implements though, a genre mashup approach that allows it to stand out from the plethora of similar titles.

Centuries ago, an Evil Serpent demon was born from the desires of human. Four masters from four different sects gathered together to seal the snake within the Imperial City. As the years pass, Four Guardians were constructed in order to prevent the Evil Serpent from escaping and wreaking havoc on the rest of the world. Since then, four different masters would travel to the Imperial City to awaken the Four Guardians to trap the snake. With the threat of the Evil Serpent rising once more, four different masters come together once more: Hongruo,...

This month’s Chinese New Year holidays will be a litmus test for the strength of China’s film industry recovery following a period of unprecedented turmoil.

This time last year, China’s wrecked Spring Festival celebrations were emblematic of the coronavirus crisis that had dramatically engulfed the world’s most populous nation and was soon to become a global pandemic. Emergency hospitals were being hastily erected in Wuhan, lockdowns had spread nationwide and businesses had little idea when they would reopen.

For China’s cinemas, the annual 10-day holiday — which shifts between January and February depending on the year — is usually an unparalleled boom time that accounts for 10%-15% of annual gross revenues. Holiday box office in 2019 hit record levels of RMB5.8 billion ($892 million), according to ticketing agency Maoyan. But in 2020, it was zero.

Since January, China’s state media has been carefully managing expectations downward, with reports quoting...

Starring Chen Kun and Zhou Xun, the film will be released theatrically in China on February 12.

Netflix has acquired global exclusive streaming rights outside China to Li Weiran’s The Yin Yang Master, which is scheduled for a theatrical release in China this weekend in time for Chinese New Year.

Starring Chen Kun and Zhou Xun, the film is an adaptation of the popular mobile game Onmyoji and produced by Chen Kuo-fu and Chang Chia-lu. The fantasy drama tells the story of a young man travelling to different worlds to prepare them for an upcoming war between monsters and humans.

Netflix has picked up international streaming rights to Chinese fantasy feature The Yin Yang Master, one of the major titles set for release during China’s upcoming Lunar New Year box office bonanza.

The film is an adaptation of the popular Chinese role-playing game Onmyoji, which is itself based on the blockbuster fantasy novel of the same name by Japanese author by Baku Yumemakura.

Netflix acquired global streaming rights to the film, excluding China, from Beijing-based producer and distributor Huayi Brothers Media. Netflix has yet to announce a streaming release date for the film, but it opens theatrically in China on Friday,...

Netflix has picked up international streaming rights to Chinese fantasy feature The Yin Yang Master, one of the major titles set for release during China’s upcoming Lunar New Year box office bonanza.

The film is an adaptation of the popular Chinese role-playing game Onmyoji, which is itself based on the blockbuster fantasy novel of the same name by Japanese author by Baku Yumemakura.

Netflix acquired global streaming rights to the film, excluding China, from Beijing-based producer and distributor Huayi Brothers Media. Netflix has yet to announce a streaming release date for the film, but it opens theatrically in China on Friday,...

Netflix has picked up international rights to “The Yin Yang Master” a film that is one of the big seven tentpole titles that will open in mainland Chinese cinemas on Friday and compete for Lunar New Year holiday audiences.

Netflix acquired distribution rights in the rest of the world ex-mainland China from Huayi Brothers Media (“The Eight Hundred”).

The fantasy movie is a game-to-film adaptation of “Onmyoji” directed by Li Weiran and starring Chen Kun (“Mojin: The Lost Legend”) and Zhou Xun.

It should not be confused with another film with a similar title “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” that ultimately draws on the same source material. The latter is the first element of a two-part, book-to-film adaptation, directed by Guo Jingming (“Tiny Times”). Netflix acquired rights to the Guo title from sales agency Fortissimo Films ahead of the film’s mainland China release on Dec. 25. It earned some...

Netflix has acquired exclusive global streaming rights outside of China to The Yin Yang Master. This is not to be confused with The Yin-Yang Master: Dream Of Eternity which is already on the service and was released in China late last year. The new acquisition is one of the anticipated Lunar New Year titles that will begin its Chinese theatrical run on Friday. Netflix has not yet set a streaming date.

Adapted from the popular mobile game Onmyōji, the fantasy film reunites stars Chen Kun and Zhou Xun in their first collaboration since 2012’s Painted Skin: The Resurrection. Produced by Chen Kuo-fu and Chang Chia-lu and directed by Li Weiran, The Yin Yang Master finds the world on the verge of a devastating war with monsters who are coming back to retrieve the Scaling Stone. Yin Yang Master Qingming’s (Chen Kun) life is in danger and he travels to...

Disney/Pixar’s Soul continues to perform above expectations, grossing a total of $36.2m since its opened on December 25.

Local drama A Little Red Flower has reached a cumulative total of $160.3m at the China box office since opening on December 31, according to theatrical consultancy Artisan Gateway, while Disney/Pixar’s Soul continues to perform above expectations, grossing a total of $36.2m since its opened on December 25.

Directed by Han Yan and starring Jackson Yee, A Little Red Flower took a further $21.9m over the three-day weekend (January 8-10) for pole position in the weekend chart. Also performing strongly, Universe Entertainment...

Disney/Pixar’s “Soul” continues to charm China with sales of $13.8 million over its second weekend, more than double its $5.5 million Christmas debut, thanks to strong word of mouth. It was the highest-grossing foreign import of the New Year weekend, far outstripping “Wonder Woman 1984” and even Hayao Miyazaki’s older but beloved animation “Ponyo.”

The weekend was huge. Industry consultancy, Artisan Gateway reported it as weighing in at $199 million, and other sources claim that is the biggest ever New Year weekend on record.

But the course of the next week promises to be disrupted by reactions to two separate plagiarism problems. State media reported that “The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity,” and “Bath Buddies” will both be removed from circulation from Monday.

Director Guo Jingming on Thursday publicly apologized for plagiarizing part of another author’s work in his 2003 novel “Never Flowers in Never Dreams.” Now, his new film “The Yin-Yang Master,...