As this year’s Oscar race goes into the home stretch, Universal is preparing to roll out its top contender, the highly anticipated World War II epic “Unbroken.” But as it looks ahead to the movie’s wider release worldwide, the studio is facing a complicated and rather delicate situation in two of its most critical foreign markets: Japan and China.
In Japan, “Unbroken” is bound to meet considerable resistance due to its depiction of the brutality of Japanese POW camps. In China, which was occupied by Japan during the war, it will likely be welcomed with open arms - for just the same reason.
Adapted by director Angelina Jolie from Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 nonfiction bestseller, “Unbroken” hits American theaters on Dec. 25. It chronicles the remarkable life of Olympic runner turned war hero Louis Zamperini, who survived the crash of his B-24 bomber in the Pacific, spent 47 days adrift on a raft and then endured 2 1/2 years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps before finally being liberated by U.S. forces at the end of World War II.
In the book, Hillenbrand depicts the treatment of Zamperini and his fellow prisoners at the hands of the sadistic Japanese Cpl. Mutsuhiro Watanabe and other prison guards in unflinching and harrowing detail. In Japanese prison camps, she writes, “to abuse, enslave, and even murder a captive or POW was considered acceptable, even desirable.”
While Universal is still developing its strategy for the film’s Japanese release, Universal Filmed Entertainment Group Chairman Jeff Shell acknowledges that selling the movie there will be a challenge.
“Obviously, the content of the book is a difficult one in the Japanese market,” Shell said during a recent visit to China. “So we’re probably going to wait a little bit and release it later in the year there than in the rest of the world. We’re going to delay it a little bit so we can have a different kind of launch there.”
A lot of money is riding on how Universal positions the film in both countries. China represents the second largest film market in the world after the United States, and Japan is No. 3. In China, American tent-pole films that win one of the coveted release slots under the government’s quota system can often earn upward of $100 million, though the studios collect only 25% of the grosses. (This summer’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction” earned a record-setting $301 million at the Chinese box office.) In Japan, the numbers are not as big, but they’re still substantial, with Hollywood blockbusters routinely pulling in tens of millions of dollars.
Although “Unbroken” is not the type of big-budget, CGI-packed action spectacle that tends to draw the largest audiences abroad, Universal, after investing $65 million in the film’s production and millions more on its promotion, hopes to maximize its box office receipts everywhere it can. And with the studio having released only one film in China in 2014, “Despicable Me 2,” “Unbroken” offers a chance for Universal to improve its performance in that crucial market, where it recently launched a new Beijing office and announced plans to open a $3.3-billion theme park.
Though the movie has not yet been approved by the government for release in China, it is poised to find an enthusiastic audience there. Hillenbrand’s book has been translated into Chinese and earned largely positive reviews there, and WWII movies like “Pearl Harbor” and “Saving Private Ryan” have performed strongly at the Chinese box office. Jolie also has a large and enthusiastic following in the country.
