The martial-arts classic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’’ won four Oscars in 2001, including Best Foreign Language Film, and is still the highest-grossing subtitled film ever released in North America by a wide margin.
So why is the belated sequel being dumped Friday on Netflix and a few Imax screens without advance screenings? And where exactly are those screens? The Weinstein Co., which co-produced the film with a Chinese company, referred all questions to Imax — where a spokeswoman told me the list of 10 to 12 Imax theaters wasn’t available.
Some investigative reporting at movietickets.com reveals the embarrassing answer: local fans of the original film can watch the sequel on the big screen at… the AMC Jersey Gardens in Elizabeth, NJ, right across the turnpike from Newark Airport.
New Yorkers shouldn’t feel too bad about the 15-mile schlep from Manhattan. Los Angelenos will have to trek 20 miles out of town to the AMC Puente Hills in Industry City, Calif. — and San Francisco’s large Asian community is facing a 40-mile journey to the AMC Cupertino Square in Silicon Valley.
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny’’ is playing at the independently owned Navy Pier multiplex right in Chicago, but movietickets.com searches failed to turn up a single booking within 40 miles of the other cities I checked: Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit and Phoenix.
Netflix originally planned a wider Imax release for last summer, but the major movie chains, including AMC and Regal, balked at a simultaneous release on Netflix (AMC has been known to rent out its screens for so-called, day-and-date releases timed with a digital platform).
One confusing thing about those movietickets.com listings, though: they say the film is in Mandarin with English subtitles (like the original “Crouching Tiger’’). But Harvey Weinstein, in a guest column for Deadine, says the film was shot in English. Netflix is showing an English-language version, with an optional soundtrack that’s been dubbed in Cantonese.
Perhaps the biggest mystery is the lack of advance screenings for a sequel to an Oscar-winning film that brings back two of the original stars, Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen (whose character reportedly says he faked his death in the original). After all, Netflix is screening “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday’’ for critics.
The answer may be found in the less-than-stellar English-language reviews for “Sword of Destiny’’ coming out of Netflix-free China, where the film opened (in theaters only) last week.
James Marsh of Screen Daily writes that the sequel “always feels like a cash-in, arriving 15 years too late.’’
He opines that director Yuen Woo-ping — taking over from original, Oscar-nominated helmer Ang Lee — “recaptures none of the ravishing operatic grace that helped its predecessor scale cultural and linguistic divides . . . Clocking in at just 96 minutes, ‘Sword of Destiny’ feels heavily truncated, lacking in narrative substance. Scant characterization and timid action choreography don’t help matters.”
Elizabeth Kerr of the Hollywood Reporter, who says that the film takes “a page from the cynical Hollywood book that hoists sequels no one wants onto moviegoers,’’ is only slightly less negative.
She terms the sequel “less actively bad than it is plodding, relying on well-worn plot beats and recurring motifs’’ and predicts it “seems primed to be greeted with broad indifference.’’
“Sword of Destiny’’ actually opened at No. 2 in China — well behind Stephen Chow’s ecological fantasy “The Mermaid,’’ which has broken the country’s all-time box-office record with $413 million in ticket sales in two weeks.
As it happens, “The Mermaid’’ was also unceremoniously dumped without screenings by its North American distributor, Sony Pictures Entertainment. Playing without fanfare at 35 theaters, “The Mermaid’’ scored last weekend’s highest per-screen average, a whopping $28,144. Somehow I doubt “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny’’ will be that lucky.