None of them really enjoys the same status as Irony of Fate, though.

I just asked my mom, and she does.lol.

Irony of Fate is probably the most famous thing ever. It won't die since every year they show it. My parents watch it every year - I think they show it on Channel 1..

Actually, all of Ryazanov's pictures have big cult status, since he's the biggest "people's" director (right there with Gaidai) and everybody has seen his films multiple times. I think Workplace Romance would be his next biggest beloved thing after Irony of Fate (and his biggest theatrical success - 58.4 million admissions). If they make a sequel - I'm sure it can be as huge as Irony 2. Everybody will rush to see it for the old star cast. It sounds like a sure thing - we just need somebody to realize this opportunity.

I think Irony of Fate is shown at least 5 times on different channels throughout the holiday season.

Here's some interesting and unusual thing about Hancock. Nice localization.

OMFG!!!
HANCOCK is a MONSTER!!! $11.7 m weekend! That's absolutely crazy!
Will Smith is super big star here, but still the best-case scenario I considered was $7-9 m opening closer to the I am Legend's total. Now it knocks out Wanted from the 4th best opening of all-time (we'll see what's the final number in Ukraine - may be Shrek 3 will also fall from its 3rd place). Now we are looking at $25 million total. That's a truly amazing Summer! We already have 2 $20+ million grossers (Panda and Wanted) with Hancock becoming the 3rd one next week (and after Hancock's gross I'm really scared how much Mummy 3, the sequel of the 2001 year b/o champion, can take - so that's a potential 4th $20+million grosser).

OK, they slightly underestimated Hancock. It's $11.77 w/o Ukraine.

So, here's the Biggest openings of all-time in CIS:

1. The Very Best Film $17.82
2. Pirates: AWE $15.62
3. Shrek 3 $13.19
4. Hancock $12.7 (updated)
5. Wanted $11.35
6. Pirates: DMC $10.3
7. Irony of Fate 2 $10.25
8. Indiane Jones 4 $9.11
9. Kung Fu Panda $9.06
10. Spider-man 3 $8.48

So this means that we got 6 out of 10 best openers in the last 7 months!

And the thing I want to mention is, that Ukraine's portion dropped significantly thanks to anti-people revanchist law requiring to dub films in Ukrainian (while Russian is spoken by the majority of the population as everyday language, with Eastern and Southern parts being almost all Russian-speaking). The recent underperformance of Wanted was explained by the officials as "Ukrainian audience likes violent films much less than Russians" - sure, we are violent bastards. I'm looking forward to see the yearly b/o data.

Yeah, and I totally hate to say that, guys, but Wall-E's 2nd weekend fell below Rat's ($1.76 Vs $1.87) after a bigger opening, mainly because Hancock sent it to knock out occupying all the screens. However, I expect it to stabilize a bit and hopefully make it to $14 m total.
On the other hand, Meet Dave did $1.2 m w/o Ukraine - PTA is not very encouraging, but the number is still big.

Such measures of Ukrainian authorities reduced box office potential at least by 20-30%. It's worth to mention also that quality of dubbing is very low and sometimes people are more laughing at numerous mistakes in translation and bad dubbing than jokes in the movie. That's why some recent comedies were doing pretty good in Ukraine.

Haha, good point!
Being a Ukrainian on nearly a half, I think it's a pretty funny language on its own, though.

How much do you think the total would be by the end of the year, and what growth rate we can expect? Is there anywhere accurate yearly numbers?

BTW, when do you have presidential elections?

I don't see any huge hit this year, so it's quite possible that no one will be able to beat The Very Best Film with about 2.5 mln. Although in a some way our situation is much more favorable to blockbusters than other films. Basically we get less movies in our cinemas because our industry cannot make enough dubbed copies and that means more screens and shows for the big ones. For example I live several blocks from the biggest multiplex in the country (7 screens) which opened last year. Before law restrictions they showed up to 13-15 movies on 7 screens, now only 5-7, sometimes even less.

the title to this thread is a bit misleading isnt it? im sure Russia is still lagging behind germany and the UK

I don't see what do you find misleading here. It's called "Leading the KJ Global Club", because it was first to start the recent trend of country-specific threads, and this has nothing to do with the b/o total.

P.S. So, billy, who's going to the movies now? Especially Eastern and Southern part, with the most ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers? Did any groups increase their moviegoing activity? So what can we expect in the next few years? What are the trends that you see?

Riggs started it.

Riggs started the thread, but not the trend. For some unknown reason his topic existed for couple of years and nobody ever opened the international thread, except the one for Canada. That's not exactly what you call "a trend", when others respond to your call few years after. But once I have created this one, we got China, Germany, Poland and Spain within DAYS, which I don't consider unrelated coincidences. I think that's the trend. To do something first and to make others follow is not the same thing, that's why I say I have started the recent trend, while Riggs has his credit for being the first who opened the country-specific thread.

Riggs started it. It was just not noticed until late.

March 29th 2008 (Austrian thread):



I should have started the Canadian thread back than...

Then I must have mistaken 4 threads in a row created within a week after mine for a trend. These 5 threads, including mine, must have been the 2 years delayed response for Riggs' Austria thread, which just suddenly and coincidentally happened shortly after my thread. Probably my logic does not work well these days.
I think this becomes ridiculous...

It sounds CRAZY, but HELLBOY 2 did a superhot opening of $4.5 million!!! The opening alone TRIPLES the total amount the first one did in 2004. I've never expected this to happen! I mean...the character is absolutely, totally unknown, and the first one was quite far from being a hit. That's absolutely awesome! Not to mention that Hellboy 2 is gonna end up with the one of the highest improvements for the sequel over the original (I should research that, but from the top of my head I can say it should be in the top 5-10 record-setting improvements for any sequel).

Moreover, since Hellboy 2 was able to jump that high, it makes me feel that The Dark Knight could do the same in August, since BB's total in 05 was the same as Hellboy did in 04. Hellboy's gross gives TDK a decent chance for a solid b/o grosses.

BTW, it seems that the yearly total B/O to-date has finally reached $500 million (not including Ukraine).

So sad that Wall-E died so soon here - it opened much bigger than Rat, but ends up just a little bit higher than Rat's total. Pixar grows much slower than Dreamworks - the crowd just does not identify Pixar's creations very well, since it's only 1 movie a year. Dreamworks, on the other hand, is a constant hitmaker, which will end the year with 2 $20+ million grossers (Panda and Madagascar 2). It's just a monster - and kids really seem to like it more than Pixar.

Next week is gonna be interesting since we'll see how big is the nostalgic factor of X-files.

Russkis cannot relate to Wall-E because the movie requires a soul to love it.

Same as Americans and most of other countries, since Wall-E wasn't a smashing hit anywhere yet.

They love it even more here actually, since it gets excellent user grades - 9.33 on average from kinopoisk.ru (2801 votes) Vs 8.8 on imdb, which means Russkis have 6% more soul than others.

According to Hollywood Reporter and Fox International Russia is now 7th foreign market with 31% increase from last year.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con ... 01a37e1db6

Why is dubbing a big issue in Russia/Ukraine? I know you guys have had a rough ride in the last twenty years, but you also still have a higher literacy rate than we do, last I checked, and only wire-fu cheese is ever dubbed here.

Because you want to have an opportunity to watch movies on your native language. As far as I know, most of the foreign movies are not dubbed in the US, but subtitled instead, and that's part of the problem why the demand for them is not that high. Nobody likes to read subtitles. Dubs are much better - if you had dubs on your native language for as long time as you can remember, you won't buy into subtitles since it's a huge downgrade.

A very big part of Ukrainian population are native Russians with Russian being first or second native language - Southern part and most of Eastern part of the country are all Russian. And as far as I know Russian is also a language of everyday use and a business language in most of Ukraine as well. And many people merge Russian and Ukrainian in their speech.

Overall all these stupid acts are part of the dirty political game played by the current authorities after the 'orange' revolution, who try to transfer people's attention from their constant faults in the economy. They are playing out the "national" card and policy of Ukrainization, which is a good thing, you shouldn't forget your native culture (and it's a great culture, no doubts), but you can't act in these terms, trying to decrease the influence of Russian culture by brute force - making all these stupid anti-Russian laws and stuff, trying to degrade the strong historical and cultural links (we lived as One nation for more than 1500 years, essentially). I would say that orange guys in these 4 years made more harm to their own nation than both nazis and Soviets in the worst times taken together, and they have already proven that they will stop at nothing to separate our nations.

American media praises achievements of the democraZy in Ukraine, which is completely not true. This country is currently ruled by a highly nationalistic coalition. They close Russian schools in areas highly populated by native Russians, limit opportunities to study in Russian, watch movies in Russian. They've found a flaw in original translation of the term "minority language" and its status in European treaties and base all their actions on these - but it's against all the European policies to treat languages of minorities in this way. They violate all kinds of international treaties and policies, as well as Russian-Ukrainian treaties of the 1990s. They make traitors who fought on the side of nazis in WWII new national heroes and liberators, as well as some historical figures who betrayed Russia in other wars. They also try to make the international community accept Holodomor as official genocide of Ukrainian nation organized and directed by Soviet government - kind of like Holocaust for Jewish. Holodomor, which is the name of famine of the 1930s was a huge national tragedy resulted from political mistakes of collectivization, bad weather and massive failure of corps, while around 10 million Ukrainians died from starvation (since it was the best territory for crops), 7 million of Russians and 1 million of Kazakhs died as well. So how come this can be a directed genocide solely against Ukrainian nation? Historical fault and natural factors – yes, Ukrainian Holocaust – definitely not.

Now they are going even further: trying to degrade the influence of Russian orthodox church by the means, which are unbelievable and unheard of even by the Bolshevik standards (the worst thing would be if they just shoot all the priests). There's currently a jubilee of Christening of Rus, 1020 years, huge event, needless to say. Official legitimate Ukrainian church is and always was a part of Russian church under the Moscow Patriarch, head of Russian Orthodox church. Now they are trying to do their best to degrade the legitimate church and raise and legitimize a different one, which is considered illegitimate and unauthorized by the main Church, and make it independent. What can be dirtier than political games with religion? They opened a score of spits in the face of Russian culture, and they won’t stop on this. It takes only a look on the face of Yushchenko to understand how ugly and rotten his regime is. Needless to say that his popularity is on all-time low level because of all the shit he and his friends make.

Oh, and if I say something like this in Ukraine – they will arrest me, then probably kick me out of the country and make a lifetime prohibition from visiting it. Now there’s freedom of speech and democracy there. All Russian politicians and public figures who criticize current Ukrainian government and president are banned from entering the country, including people on the level as high as leaders of political parties and even a mayor of Moscow for anti-Ukrainian statements. I bet they don’t write these things in the Western media, or do they? Because, it doesn’t look like democracy and freedom…

I hope that helps to see things happening there in perspective other than just moviegoing...