Budget: $ 50 million. Collection in cinemas: almost 700 million, being almost all due to the Chinese theaters, where it was an unparalleled bombshell. We are facing the fourth highest grossing film (without limiting inflation) in Chinese history, which is the same as saying the fourth highest grossing non-English speaking film. An epic space opera set in a fictional 2,500 where mankind has glued space thrusters to Earth and people literally end up shooting miniguns at Jupiter.
The case The Wandering Earth, O The Wandering Land. We did our analysis on Espinof in 2019, when Netflix released it worldwide after having paid for it some astronomical and indeterminate amount for its exclusive rights. It was the first Chinese science fiction blockbuster of this size adapting a novel by Liu Cixin, the father of this literary genre in the country. It had an experienced director and a good cast of actors.
At the plot level, it sounds like a rehash of many well-known works in the field, 2001: A Space Odyssey Y Gravity, among others, but its visual merits and its good work in keeping the action always alive make it a worthy popcorn entertainment as valid as many others on the current offer.
It happened with this behemoth and it also happened this year with an indie gem: A Sun O The Burning SunChung Mong-hong’s nominee was nominated for the Best International Film Oscars for Taiwan in February. It had already won over some film critics in Toronto months ago, but it was with the Academy’s announcement that many came to look for when the digital premiere of this potential remarkable work would be to discover that it had been on Netflix since January at the bottom of the barrel, obviated by the recommendation algorithms and, of course, without having received any promotional attention from the platform.
According to the press, most likely not even those at Netflix knew that they had something good out there, because this is how catalog purchases work in many cases to keep their audiovisual files fresh, in bulk and without subsequent curation work.
Comparative Tort: Perhaps the problem is not so much the platform’s lack of advertising support for these films as the contrast that occurs when seeing how they are catapulted into privileged spaces Triple Frontier O The Cloverfield ParadoxFor example, two of his last great productions that his subscribers liked only the right amount. Thus, while these two have between 1,000 and 5,000 public votes on Rotten Tomatoes, The Wandering Land, a Titanic with an audience in China, barely has 500 on the tomato platform. This is where you can best see the effect that the scope of a work can cause to appear on the main Netflix screen with the trailer automatically activated or not.
In any case, we will always have the option to see both The Wandering Land What The Burning Sun now that we know they exist.