As of the morning of May 11, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes: New World", "The End of the Road" and "The Siege of the Kowloon Walled City" occupied the top three single-day box office lists. Since today is a working day, as of now, the daily box office of the three films has not exceeded 10 million, among them, the new film is only "Rise of the Planet of the Apes: New World", which is the return of the classic sci-fi IP, released for 2 days, with a total box office of more than 20 million.
The IP of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" can be traced back to "Planet of the Apes" released in 1968, and the first series consists of five parts, telling the story of a spaceship that travels to the future world at the speed of light, and the astronauts find that humans at that time have become slaves of highly intelligent apes and have to struggle to survive.
In 2011, the IP was relaunched, and the new series tells the story of Caesar, a chimpanzee who was originally the subject of drug experiments, unwilling to bear the fate of being destroyed by himself and his kind, and rose up to resist and become the leader of the clan.
From 2011 to 2017, the series of trilogies was released one after another, and while receiving a total of $1.68 billion at the box office, it also won a good reputation from critics and audiences, with freshness ratings of 82%, 91%, and 94% on the film review website "Rotten Tomatoes", respectively, which is a model of Hollywood film series that drives high and goes high.
The just-released "Rise of the Planet of the Apes: New World" is a sequel to the series, set a hundred years after the sacrifice of the protagonist Caesar of the previous work, the earth has been reduced to a wasteland, becoming a veritable reinforced concrete jungle, apes survive in the form of tribes, and the few humans who survive have lost their language function and are inferior creatures in the eyes of apes. The protagonist Noah the chimpanzee belongs to a tribe that specializes in taming falcons, and when he is young, he wants to show himself in front of his father, but he inadvertently causes his father to be killed, and all the people, including his mother, are also taken captive. In his quest to find his people, Noah befriended Raka, a red baboon full of wisdom and history, and May, a human who is different from other people. They went through many twists and turns, and in the end, Noah and May still fell into the hands of the dictator Saiza. Saisa asks May to help him open the former warehouse where humans used to store weapons, and Noah and May form an alliance for their respective goals.
Compared to the first three installments, Rise of the Planet of the Apes: New World has put more thought into creating visual effects, especially in the field of motion capture. In order to achieve a high level of resemblance to the habits of real apes, the actors attended a six-week "ape school" before the official shooting, where they received special training from action director Alain Gaultier. Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in the first trilogy, was also hired as a special consultant for the film, helping the actors fine-tune their vocalizations and refine the character's personality.
The actual motion capture effects are still done by Peter Jackson's Weta Studios. The VFX team consisted of two separate teams: a motion capture team, whose job was to capture the actors' facial expressions and body movements; The other is the field team, which captures the scene and location through lidar scanning and reference cameras, allowing light to be replicated in the digital space.
"One of our big advances is to use a head-mounted facial camera to record the facial expressions of the actors," reveals Erik Winquist, who returns as visual effects supervisor. Director Wes Ball emphasized: "We're either shooting on location or having full CG characters, just like Avatar." We shot more like Avatar than The Mandalorian. ”
In addition, this weekend is Mother's Day, and there are also several movies about moms released, including "Mom in Tears", "Mom and Seven Days of Time", etc.
"Mom and Seven Days of Time" is a candid expression of the director's own experience. Director Li Dongmei incarnates the "little salt" in the film, and the story tells the daily life and impermanence of her mother in the seven days before and after her death.
In the nineties of the last century, in a remote mountain village in Chongqing, a silent mother, she had given birth to four daughters, and the fifth child was about to give birth, with endless expectations, but what she didn't know was that at the moment of delivery late at night on the sixth day, a new life came and took her life. The daily and impermanence of seven days, repeating and passing like still water, the passing and rebirth of life, in this ordinary rural family, constructed the dusty memory of a twelve-year-old girl, who was trapped in place, looking at her mother in the vague memory forever.
The director poured this work with almost white images and simple and real emotions.
It is understood that the film "Mom and Seven Days of Time" has been shortlisted for the 77th Venice International Film Festival, the 44th Gothenburg International Film Festival, the 13th Beijing International Film Festival, the 4th Pingyao International Film Festival, the 45th Hong Kong International Film Festival, the 25th Busan International Film Festival, the 25th Shanghai International Film Festival, etc. Among them, the film won the "Ingmar Bergman" Best International Film Debut Award at the 44th Gothenburg International Film Festival and the Fei Mu Honorary Best Film Award at the 4th Pingyao International Film Festival.
Also released on May 17, "Stunt Maniac," a critically acclaimed Hollywood action film during the Beijing Film Festival, and "Wandering Blade," both released this weekend, and "The Wandering Blade," both opened this weekend.
Before the Dragon Boat Festival, there were not too many new domestic films with commercial competitiveness, and 7 films had been finalized in the Dragon Boat Festival. (Seven films have been scheduled for the Dragon Boat Festival)