Matt Damon's The Great Wall Opens Big In China
12/19/2016 11:25 am EST
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story might be dominating the box office in the U.S. for its opening weekend but overseas its The Great Wall showing its strength.
The film starring Matt Damon as a mercenary leading the battle for the Middle Kingdom opened to $67.4 million over the weekend at the Chinese box office according to the local box-office tracker Ent Group, with expectations of a slight bump in an optimistic direction as numbers come in from Beijing later.
The Great Wall is directed by an iconic Oscar-nominated Chinese director Zhang Yimou. It is the biggest China-Hollywood co-production ever, with an estimated budget of $150 million. It is a product of Legendary Pictures, Universal Studios, China Film Group, and Le Vision Pictures.
The massive opening is the fourth-largest in China this year, behind only The Mermaid (a Chinese film), Captain America: Civil War, and Warcraft (another Legendary film). Civil War also had a brilliant box office run in the U.S. while Warcraft cannot say the say. In China, the Marvel film brought in $96 million in the first three days before totaling over $408 million domestically. Warcraft nabbed $46 million at the Chinese box office before slowing down for $47 million domestically in its entire run.
In The Great Wall, "there are three Westerners in the movie; it's Pedro and me and Willem Dafoe," Damon explained to ComicBook.com at New York Comic Con. "And we play these guys who are mercenaries who basically come to steal gun powder from the Chinese and we've heard of this legendary weapon and we want to bring it back to the West and try to conquer the West with it. And we kind of stumble upon this secretive army that basically exists to defend the Great Wall against these monsters that attack every 60-years. And we kind of stumble upon them on the eve of this battle and prove ourselves useful enough that we end of fighting with them against this assault of monsters."
The Great Wall opens in theaters domestically on February 17, 2017.
(via THR)
Disclosure: ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of Paramount. Sign up for Paramount+ by clicking here.