Pacific Rim
The movie Pacific Rim has been getting a lot of love around the actual Asian Pacific Rim recently, with China especially talking about it, though perhaps not for the best reasons. Japan too, being a lover of giant monster movies, has taken to Guillermo del Toro’s work, with praise from game makers Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear, Zone of Enders) and manga artists Go Nagai (Marzinger Z) and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion).
Also, in honor of the film a video was posted to YouTube titled “Pacific Rim Main Theme 8bit Arrange” which along with NES-tech rendition of the movie’s main theme gives us a nostalgic intro scene to what could have been a great video game adaptation of Pacific Rim. There are even some cute sprite versions of the Jaegers!
While the Guillermo del Toro ode to tokusatsu (Godzilla, Ultraman, etc.) films had a reasonable opening in its home country, the box office take was rather low to cover its $190 million dollar budget. However, thanks to an astounding foreign release Pacific Rim can be considered a big success – the highest grossing foreign film of the year so far to be exact.
A large part of that success can be attributed to the might of the massive Chinese film going population. As of 18 August, the Chinese revenue was reported to be 618 million yuan (US$100M) surpassing even what Pacific Rim pulled in its home country. But there’s another reason why people are paying attention to the film’s Chinese release.