1942 debut flops, Huayi Brothers plunges

Shenzhen-listed entertainment company Huayi Brothers Media Corp closed down by 10 percent Friday, the maximum daily decline allowed on the Chinese stock market, because the debut of its 200 million yuan ($32.1 million) feature Back to 1942 disappointed both the audience and investors, the Shanghai-based National Business Daily (NBD) reported over the weekend.

The famine-themed blockbuster scored less than 6 points out of 10 on movie.douban.com, a popular domestic film rating website, with 59 percent of users giving it a score of only 1 point, Beijing-based entertainment industry consultancy Entgroup International Consulting said on its website Friday.

Data from mtime.com, another domestic online film information provider, showed Sunday that the Huayi Brothers movie scored 6.9 out of 10 points, compared with 9 points for the 3-D Hollywood adventure Life of Pi.

Huayi Brothers issued an impromptu statement late Friday, saying that Back to 1942 made 26 million yuan on its premiere.

Huayi Brothers could not be reached for comment by press time.

The statement caused some domestic experts to speculate that the film's negative reviews and comparatively poor box office performance disapointed investors.

The company's fairy fantasy Painted Skin: The Resurrection debuted in the summer to 70 million yuan in box office revenues on the first day, according to the NBD.

And its film Aftershock, directed by Back to 1942 director Feng Xiaogang, raked in 36.3 million yuan in ticket sales at its 2010 debut.

According to a new box office revenue sharing agreement signed on November 24 between Huayi Brothers and cinemas such as Wanda Cinemas, Huayi Brothers, which is also the distributor of the film, is likely to get over 44.25 percent of the total box office revenues of Back to 1942, up from 43 percent in a previous agreement, analysts at China Securities Co wrote in a report Thursday, based on an estimation that the film's total ticket sales would surpass 800 million yuan.

"The drop in Huayi's share prices may be mainly caused by domestic cinemas that are not satisfied with the new box office sharing method. Many domestic cinemas are also shareholders in Huayi," Wei Guangju, an industry expert from Adfaith Management Consulting, told the Global Times Sunday.