- Let’s look at Hong Kong opening day box office first - The expected winner of the weekend, the Muay Thai action flick Chocolate, had a disappointing opening of only HK$391,000 from 33 screens, which means it might not even hit the HK$2 million mark even with a boost over the weekend. The corrupted cops drama Street Kings with Keanu Reeves opened on 30 screens for a HK$275,000 gross. The other cops drama, We Own the Night (why the two distributors decided to clash release dates, I have no idea), made even less per-screen with just barely HK$19,000 from 5 screens. Lastly, the Hong Kong idols romance flick Love is Elsewhere opened with HK$241,000 from a surprising 27 screens. Maybe the teens will show up for this one over the weekend.  More on Monday when the weekend numbers come out.

-  The Cannes lineup is about to be announced, and sadly, the Asian pickings is a little slim this year. At least there may be high-profile premieres such as Kim Jee-Woon’s The Good The Bad and the Weird and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata. However, one reportedly hasn’t been screened, and the other is still up in the air.

- The Japanese animated series Gegege no Kitaro is celebrating its 40th (non-consecutive) year on television, and Japan Times has a feature on it, especially on its tendency to be on the small screen in increments.

- On a related note, some stills from the sequel of the Gegege No Kitaro live-action movie are out. The thing is that the first movie’s monsters didn’t look all that bad, it was just the rest of the movie that was bad.

- The popular MySpace internet drama Prom Queen is getting a Japanese version. Like the original, the drama will be comprised of 80 daily 90-second episodes, even though “prom” isn’t something embedded in Japanese culture. I felt so old when I realize I didn’t even know what the hell Prom Queen was.

- And today, I leave you with one of the funniest entries I’ve ever read on Kaiju Shakedown. As always, it’s also very informative.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under blogs, festivals, animation, remake, France, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, box office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.