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2012 News
Source: Variety
BEIJING -- Disaster pic "2012" has shot past "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to become the top movie hit of all time in China, adding an exclamation point to a year in which the nation's B.O. is expected to post 40% year over year growth.
By Thursday, Sony's "2012" had taken 460 million yuan ($67.3 million), state film body the China Film Group said on its website, besting the $63 million nabbed by "Revenge of the Fallen."
Pic opened Nov. 13 with a wide release on 1,900 screens, and is still showing in many theaters.
The pro-China subplot in which the Chinese build arks to save a portion of humanity from impending doom will have helped its perf.
It's an extraordinary B.O result when compared to major film markets such as France, where "2012" has taken $43.6 million, Germany ($36.5 million) and Japan ($36.1 million). Pic's total international cume to Dec. 27 is $583.7 million.
All in all, it's shaping up to be a boffo year in China, with total B.O. surpassing $730 million in the first 10 months of the year, according to China's Film Bureau. Mainland B.O. is forecast to be up 40% on last year's figure of $630 million.
Driving the rise in box office was the rapid growth in the number of screens. China Film Group said that by the end of last year, there were 4,097, and that number is expected to rise to 4,500 by the end of this year.
Now everyone is watching to see what becomes of James Cameron's 3D sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar," scheduled to hit local screens on Jan. 4.
Cameron's "Titanic" was China's biggest movie for more than a decade until it was toppled by "Revenge of the Fallen" in July.
Foreign movies' strong perf in China comes despite a quota of around 20 allowed into the country every year on a revenue-sharing basis. (Hollywood prefers flat fees as a hit can make more money that way.) Of the 20 foreign pics, only a few are from Hollywood, as the quota covers films from around the world.
The success of the Hollywood pics is unlikely to prompt China's authorities to change the quota system because local fare is holding its own in the domestic market.
Propaganda epic "The Founding of a Republic," celebrating the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, took $61 million during its run, making it the biggest-earning local pic ever.
However, China may come under more pressure next year to free up its movie market. Earlier this month, the World Trade Organization upheld a ruling that China is illegally restricting U.S. music, film and book imports. |
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7 doomsday theories about 2012
Scientific experts from around the world are genuinely predicting that five years from now, all life on Earth could well finish. Some are saying it'll be humans that set it off. Others believe that a natural phenomenon will be the cause. And the religious folks are saying it'll be God himself who presses the stop button...
1. Mayan Calendar
The first mob to predict 2012 as the end of the world were the Mayans, a bloodthirsty race that were good at two things:
Building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone and..... sacrificing virgins.
Thousands of years ago they managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out. The Mayan calendar predicts that the Earth will end on December 21, 2012. Given that they were pretty close to the mark with the lunar cycle, it's likely they've got the end of the world right as well.
2. Religious Matters
If having scientists warning us about the end of the world isn't bad enough,religious folks are getting in on the act aswell. We have the Christian Bible saying that Armageddon is coming, and the I Ching, also known as the Chinese book of Changes, says the same thing. Yet the Hindu Kali Yuga prophecy says that the world will not end there, yet instead go into a new "Golden Age". Then of course there is the Hopi Prophecy describing an end of the 4th world and an entrance into the 5th world by a savior of sorts named Pahana.
3. Sun Storms
Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery: our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic, and it's supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, the recent solar storms have been bombarding the Earth with so much radiation energy, it's been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse, and calculations suggest it'll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012. Yet it gets worse, Earths magnetic field, which protects us from solar flares, has actually been weakening since around the year 2002. This means that by 2012, if the sun decides to throw a major temper tantrum of solar flares at us, we're cooked.
4.Magnetic Fields
We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun's radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call north and south have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so - and right now we're about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is underway, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches
5. Super Volcanoes
Yellowstone National Park in the United States is famous for its thermal springs and Old Faithful geyser. The reason for this is simple - it's sitting on top of the world's biggest volcano, and geological experts are beginning to get nervous sweats. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting every 650,000 years or so, and we're many years overdue for an explosion that will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the Earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. The pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.
Once again though, it gets worse. On the winter solstice of 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way, which has a supermassive black hole at the center of it. This powers up the Suns magnetic pull on the earth, which in turn destabilizes our tectonic plates (land). The more powerful gravitational pull will also supercharge the suns solar flare/radiation effects on us, which will make the earths core hotter. The hotter the earths core is, the faster it moves. So, in 2012, the earths core will start to move faster, get way hotter, and the earths tectonic plates will be unstable. This means that super volcanoes like the one in Yellowstone park are WAY more likely to go boom :D
6. The Physicists
This one's case of bog-simple maths mathematics. Physicists at Berekely Uni have been crunching the numbers. and they've determined that the Earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Even worse, they're claiming their calculations prove, that we're all going to die, very soon - while also saying their prediction comes with a certainty of 99 percent- and 2012 just happens to be the best guess as to when it occurs.
7. The Atom Smasher
Scientists in Europe have been building the world's largest particle accelerator. Basically its a 27km tunnel designed to smash atoms together to find out what makes the Universe tick. However, the mega-gadget has caused serious concern, with some scientists suggesting that it's properly even a bad idea to turn it on in the first place. They're predicting all manner of deadly results, including mini black holes. So when this machine is fired up for its first serious experiment in 2012, the world could be crushed into a super-dense blob the size of a basketball. |
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