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| A scene from Django Unchained. (China Daily) |
Suspended film is re-released after 3 minutes are removed
Film director Quentin Tarantino's violent anti-slavery saga Django Unchained returned to China's screens on Sunday after being dramatically pulled from the country's theaters about a month ago.
Screenings of the movie were suddenly suspended at theaters on April 11, its opening day in China, by the movie's importer, China Film Group Corp.
Some "minor changes" have been made to the returned film, according to Shanghai's UME Cineplex. In April, the film was abruptly dropped for "unspecific technology reasons".
It is reported that the new edition is three minutes shorter than the previous one, with nudity scenes omitted.
The then 165-minute film was expected to reap "a conservative 60 million yuan ($9.8 million) in ticket sales" during its April debut.
But the Oscar-winning film got off to a poor opening in China on Sunday - if not a box office debacle - box office receipts in Shanghai and Beijing showed.
"The film's seat occupancy rate is below 30 percent as of 3:30 this afternoon," said Zhang Wenwen, manager of Wanda International Cineplex, Beijing.
In Shanghai, a rather higher 50 percent rate was experienced by the UME International Cineplex in Xintiandi, a landmark of the metropolis. But it is still below the box office average compared with other Hollywood movies including Iron Man 3 and Tom Cruise's Oblivion, which debuted on Friday, according to a staff member of the cinema's ticket office surnamed Xi.
On Gewara.com, a popular film ticket selling website, both Shanghai and Beijing witnessed no more than 6,000 people buy tickets for the film on Sunday, while Oblivion sold more than 50,000 tickets across the two cities.
"It's bad timing for the return of the film," said Geng Yuejin, vice-manager of Edko Films Ltd, which runs 21 theaters across the country.
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