“Full River Red,” the Zhang Yimou-directed period comedy-drama that released in January this year has earned its producer Huanxi Media Beijing the 2023 Asia Pacific Box Office Achievement Award at the CineAsia convention.
The convention gets under way Monday in Bangkok and will run till Thursday (Dec. 4-7). The prize will be presented at a gala lunch event on the last day.
“This popular period comedy amassed an incredible $670 million in the APAC region and is Zhang Yimou’s biggest box office hit to date,” said Frank Perikleous, VP for APAC & Australia at data collection and analysis firm Comscore Movies. “Huanxi Media’s understanding of the Asian movie industry and their commitment to delivering quality content to theatres not only in China but around the region, has been instrumental in the overall health of the APAC marketplace.”
The film was released in theaters in time for the Chinese New Year holiday season and snapped up $60 million on its opening day in China and $183 million in its first three days of release. In the first seven days of release the film made over $430 million in box office and accounted for 56 million admissions. It went on to become the China’s top film this year and the sixth all-time highest-grossing movie in China.
“Being able to recognize a film from legendary director Zhang Yimou, whose large body of work includes ‘House Of Flying Daggers,’ ‘Hero’ and ‘Raise The Red Lantern,’ is very exciting,” said Andrew Sunshine, president of CineAsia organizer, Film Expo Group.
“Our company is dedicated to creating high-quality entertaining films from China’s top movie directors. The record-breaking success of Zhang Yimou’s ‘Full River Red’ is a great example of what Huanxi Media can achieve with vision and commitment, not just this year, but in the years ahead,” said Li Yongyi of Huanxi Media.
Having struggled to break into the film industry shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang has had multiple roles as actor, cinematographer, screenwriter and producer. He is now among China’s most celebrated ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers and was recently celebrated with a lifetime achievement award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. He recently said that he intends to focus on directing and shoot one film per year until he can no longer do so. In order to keep up that pace of output he may cut back his screenwriting efforts.
Other prizes to be awarded at CineAsia include: Siddhart Roy Kapur as the Motion Picture Association Asia-Pacific Copyright Educator of the year, Javier Sotomajor of Cinepolis as Exhibitor of the year, Eugene Yang of Paramount Pictures International as exhibitor of the year, Benny Suherman of Indonesia’s XXI as CineAsia Icon. Wanda Films’ executive president Chen Hongtao will also receive the showmanship award, at a separate ceremony on Wednesday.