Communist China is preparing to roll out the red carpet treatment for Christopher Nolan’s evisceration of The Odyssey this week by taking the unusual step of featuring the film in nearly 800 IMAX screens for it’s opening in China.
Chinese film authorities approved a huge rollout for Nolan’s vision of the nearly 3,000-year-old tale of Odysseus’s trek home from the Trojan War, according to Variety.
IMAX China CEO Daniel Manwaring, who is married to Chinese filmmaker Zhang Mo, noted that the debut is going to be “huge.”
“I’m expecting a very large majority of our entire network, if not all of our network, that first week will be playing The Odyssey,” Manwaring told the media.
Director Nolan and star Matt Damon are set to arrive in Beijing on July 30 for a red carpet event that Manwaring says will mark the first time any American film has been permitted a red carpet ceremony in Beijing.
Manwaring also insisted that Nolan himself has become a major box office draw in China, with a reputation that has steadily grown to massive proportions among Chinese film fans.
Nolan’s reputation in China “was a small snowball and it has just been continuously getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Manwaring explained. To date, that culminated in a $20 million Chinese box office run for his previous film, Oppenheimer. And Manwaring feels that The Odyssey might equal or even surpass that.
The film may also be to the liking of Chinese authorities because it tears down the ages old western cultural story of war, conquest, and glory, and turns the powerful Odysseus character into a neurotic moaner who becomes mentally disabled over his worries about his actions at war.
Even the feminist scholar whose translation of Homer’s epic poem reportedly served as the basis for Nolan’s script is ripping the film for how it mangles and maligns the story that Homer told. Indeed, Emily Wilson recently said she’d have been “ashamed” to have written the “abysmal” screenplay.
Nolan himself even admitted that the real story as written is too manly to adapt faithfully in today’s Hollywood and that is why he feminized the tale.
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