Bait 3D takes $7m on opening weekend in China
Aussie box office flop Bait 3D continues to do well overseas, with a strong opening weekend in China.
The film took approximately AU$7.05m at the Chinese box office in its first weekend in cinemas.
Distributed by Yunnan Film Group, Enlight Pictures and Scholar Media, the film opened on about 2,000 screens for a $3,600 screen average.
Producer Gary Hamilton said: “The audience for Bait 3D is growing exponentially worldwide,” said producer Gary Hamilton. “We’re delighted with the film’s immense success at the Chinese box office, which is a testament to the high quality of entertainment Bait has to offer.”
Wow — $7mil is an impressive result!
Congrats to the team!
Want to know why Bait did so well in China? It’s not because of quality or storyline, everyone in China who has seen it thought it was bad. It was due mainly to supposedly having the local Chinese marital arts star in it. Most who went to see the movie was because of him! HOWEVER, the final product only have 1 MINUTE of him! Chinese users (I included, though I’m not Chinese) are outrage! The Chinese actor worked so hard, he even got injured during the process and having his SCENES deleted enrage us! And to hear that Director Kimble will invite him to again star in the SEQUEL and add more scenes is a JUST PLAIN and Simple excuse for using his name to generate more buzz for the film! If Ashton Chen, the Chinese martial arts actor, decide to join Director Kimble better keep his work. Or he will commit career suicide in China!
How intriguing that it had a “local Chinese marital arts star in it”. Maybe they should promote it along those lines!
It’d be great to know what its worldwide cumulative figure is at this point.
Pity it didn’t find more of an audience here. It was by no means a perfect film, but I had a fun time watching it. We need to take more risks with genre films in this country!
It is doing well in China because Chinese audiences love Western action and thriller movies. Western comedies and dramas, etc are rarely released as they get ‘lost in translation’. And, only a few Western movies are shown in a Chinese cinema at one time, so the ‘competition’ against other movies is low. Other Western movies that Bait 3D is currently up against include Looper and The Cold Light of Day. The choice comes down to this: would you rather pay to see a shark-infested mall or Bruce Willis??
Easy one Mike … choice of shark-infested mall or Bruce Willis … neither.
To John Grono–it was promoted along those lines! His name is even on the poster released in China!
Bruce Willis – hands down. The guy is a legend.
Hold there Mike, I think you have very limited knowledge on Chinese film market nowadays. 80% of the films they release are from aboard [mainly Hollywood], that is even causing their home films hard to sell. So they introduced this “Chinese Film Protection Period” or sth, so during which only Chinese films are allowed to be released. So slow down when you say a few Western films are shown… [although yes I think very few Western genre films are shown lol].
@ AliceX
I live in China and go to cinemas regularly so my ‘limited’ knowledge of the Chinese film market is probably not as limited as yours. If you think 8 out of 10 movies currently showing at any Chinese cinema are from Hollywood then perhaps we have a different definition of Hollywood.