Box Office

Gizmodo is reporting that Return to Dust, directed by Li Ruijun, a film that was on the top ten charts for a few weeks grossing over $7 million, and which screened at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, was pulled from streaming services in China. While social media users have commented on the disappearance of the film on some platforms, Weibo has banned users from making any mention of the deletion.

This week, the French box office ranking is completely turned upside down since half of the movies have disappeared to make way for new ones. Well, “new” ones maybe not be that much considering that Avatar is number 1! The Avatar re-release, directed by James Cameron with Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, and Sigourney Weaver, shows the franchise's overseas strength.

Waiting for its long-awaited sequel – opening in December all over the world, Italy included -  James Cameron's 2009 Avatar is making once again splashes at the box office in its re-release in theaters: grossing $1,658. 061 (same in Euros) on its second week of play, the 3D fantasy/sci-fi juggernaut is again at the top of Italian box-office chart, according to Cinetel's data: Avatar has so far grossed over $2 million since its release, bringing over a monthlong record of 250,000 moviegoers to the Bel Paese theaters.

George and Julia continue to rule the box office. Despite an ‘avatar’ attack.

In the end, all that drama may have helped Don’t Worry Darling. No one needed to have worried, darlings: Olivia Wilde’s second directing feature after her well-received Booksmart topped the box office with $19.

The nonprofit journalism organization restofworld. org is reporting that there are great profits for Chinese creators in reducing Hollywood movies into TikTok videos of a few minutes with the help of machine translation, dubbing apps and VPNs.

Kompromat stayed number 1 at the French box office. Directed by Jérôme Salle with Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig, and Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, the movie is about a French diplomat victim of a “Kompromat” - forged compromising documents used by the Russian secret services to harm an enemy of the state.

Viola Davis and her Agojie all-female warriors shook the box office out of its doldrums and reigned supreme. The Woman King predicted to earn from $16 million to $18 million, made $19 million instead, catapulting the action-drama-history to the top.

Paradise found. That sums up not only the brand-new number one movie but also – finally – some movement in the charts.

An interesting heads-up from Sonny Bunch writing in the Washington Post on September 15 – Chinese businesses are increasingly buying up international video game companies. Why this is worrying is that the size of the international gaming market dwarfs that of the global box office, and all video games bought by the Chinese are subject to the same censorship that is applied by the ministry of culture to movies that are approved for the Chinese audience – no Tibetan references, no time travel, ghost stories, gambling, violence or nudity.