Now that the film’s theatrical release in China has turned out to be a massive disaster of (almost) comical proportions, at least Monster hunter is not an obscenely expensive image and could still squeeze out a few dollars in the rest of the world. That includes North America, where the film hits theaters (including IMAX) not on Christmas Day but on December 18th. In a normal year, under normal circumstances, this would be one of the best release dates available for any movie.

Big movies (The Force Awakens, Titanic) and small (Sisters, Mouse Hunt) used this pre-Christmas launch pad to mark good-to-good opening weekends and relatively long milestones, as holidays for children and many adults turn the last two weeks of the year into essentially two weeks of “weekdays that act like weekends.” “But this is obviously not a normal time, and the only reason Sony has moved the film is to deviate from Wonder Woman 1984.

Yes, the Gal Gadot / Chris Pine superhero sequel is still open in all North American theaters that open on December 25, and the “partially shot in IMAX” fantasy will take precedence over those IMAX auditoriums. Monster hunter is positioned, relatively speaking, as a sort of biggie before the mega-film. In this biased sense, it is Star Trek Nemesis Where The princess and the Frog front opening The two towers Where Avatar.

As for the film directed by Paul WS Anderson, the $ 60 million video game adaptation PG-13 grossed $ 2.65 million, including $ 1.5 million in Taiwan, in a handful of overseas territories. in which it opened last weekend. It was a plus or minus $ 15 million weekend before the droppings hit the ventilator, with the film being pulled after audiences took umbrage at a line of dialogue spoken by the Asian actor / musician Jin Au-Yeung who indirectly referred to an infamous racist rank. – school song / playground.

It’s unclear if it’s coming back to Chinese theaters without this momentary interaction, but I’d say the damage is probably done. No, the movie wasn’t necessarily going to match the $ 159 million earned by Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (out of its $ 312 million in worldwide revenue), but the popularity of this video game movie starring Milla Jovovich is why Sony and friends are releasing it in theaters now instead of pushing it into 2021. The Chinese market is pretty much back to normal, although Hollywood imports haven’t had much luck there this year, except for Principle ($ 66 million) and The Croods: A New Age ($ 34 million).

The good news is that while I haven’t seen the movie yet (gives Sony the “Paddington look”), the last five theatrical video game movies have been “good” to varying degrees. Grave robber (decent), Carnage (impressive), Detective Pikachu (very well), Angry Birds Movie 2 (surprisingly good) and Sonic the hedgehog (decent) rebuked the conventional wisdom that movies based on video games are in varying degrees terrible. Will Monster hunter do 6/6? To discover, if you dare, on December 18th.