Los Angeles-based distributor Wrekin Hill Entertainment announced today that the company, in association with Row 1 Productions, will be pushing up the nationwide theatrical release for The Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale and directed by renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou. The film – a blockbuster in China – will now open on Friday, January 20th, 2012 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and 10 other cities.
The accelerated distribution plan follows strong box office grosses during the film's U.S. qualifying run in late December. The film averaged over $30,000 per screen and was among the top grossing films of the year in the three theaters in which it opened. In just a few weeks after its mid-December release in China, the film became the highest grossing Chinese film of 2011, and is still going strong. The film has been nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film.
“We had an incredible response to the film during our one-week qualifying run, with sell-out shows and increasing demand as the week unfolded,” Wrekin Hill President and CEO Chris Ball said. “As the exceptional grosses in the US and China have shown, this is a film that audiences are passionately embracing and that has real staying power.”
Director Zhang Yimou and Actor Christian Bale
In THE FLOWERS OF WAR, Director Zhang Yimou (RAISE THE RED LANTERN, JU DOU, HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS) tells an epic story of love and sacrifice. The film, set during Japan's 1937 invasion of China, is told from a young girl's point of view, not as a history lesson, but as an intimate, elemental and paradoxically universal celebration of the human spirit. Bale stars as a dissolute Westerner who seeks refuge in a Catholic church. There he meets a beautiful Chinese courtesan who helps him rescue a group of schoolgirls from a terrible fate at the hands of the Japanese.
THE FLOWERS OF WAR was adapted by Liu Heng and Geling Yan from the novel by Geling Yan. The film is produced by Zhang Weiping (marking his tenth collaboration with Zhang Yimou) under his New Pictures Film banner. The executive producers are Chaoying Deng, David Linde, and Bill Kong.
THE FLOWERS OF WAR, which is being released by Wrekin Hill Entertainment in association with Row 1 Productions, will open in the following cities on January 20th: New York, Los Angeles (including Orange County), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Houston, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington DC.
