US official confirms effort to declassify uncorroborated intel that China offered bounties on US troops

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaMTV Documentary Films will make “76 Days,” a look at the frontline medical professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, available for free beginning on January 23. The film is being offered gratis in recognition of the one-year anniversary of the start of the coronavirus lockdown in the Chinese city considered to be the early epicenter of a disease that has upended life.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefChinese film and TV studio Enlight Media says it is moving ahead with development of a movie-inspired theme park in Yangzhou, eastern China. It has selected Hollywood firm Legacy Entertainment as the designer of the park’s core Enlight Epicenter component.Plans for Enlight Movie World were first announced in 2018.

Holdover romantic drama A Little Red Flower topped a quiet weekend at China's box office, earning $11.7 million for a local total of $182.8 million. Fellow holdover Shock Wave 2, a crime thriller starring Andy Lau, scored second, adding $7.8 million for a four-weekend haul of $163.2 million, according to data from Artisan Gateway.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefFamily drama film “A Little Red Flower” continued its dominance of China’s box office in 2021 with a third weekend on top of the charts. The weekend was, however, a typically quiet one for January, worth an aggregate $47.1 million according to exhibition and distribution consultancy, Artisan Gateway.While the individual films’ scores are modest, six movies in China achieved grosses over the past weekend that were stronger than any film in North America.

Refresh for latest…: Fans of Kollywood cinema got a treat this weekend as Tamil action thriller Master debuted in India and a handful of other markets across the harvest festival period. While we do not have confirmed figures for the Vijay-starrer in India, estimates had it at around $11M from Wednesday-Friday with the film believed to have crossed the coveted Rs 100 crore ($15M) gross mark over the weekend.

Ties between prominent current and former Democrats and China continue to crop up, even as the Chinese Communist Party is trading fiery rhetoric with the Trump administration over its support of Taiwan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted restrictions on U.S.-Taiwan relations last week, a move that the CCP has criticized.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefBaidu, the tech giant that operates China’s leading web search engine and is majority owner of the iQIYI streaming platform, is reported to be seeking $3.5 billion through a secondary share listing in Hong Kong.The move has not been confirmed by the company itself, though Bloomberg identified CLSA and Goldman Sachs as the investment banks it had selected to manage the new listing and share sale.The possible development coincided with news that the New York Stock

A CNN reporter was accused Thursday of pushing China propaganda over a tweet linking the pro-Trump mob that stormed Capitol Hill to Hong Kong protesters acting in defiance of the Chinese Communist Party regime.  Following the violence that disrupted the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's election victory, CNN International correspondent Will Ripley juxtaposed an image of rioters climbing the exterior walls of the Capitol building with an image of protesters who crashed the Hong Kong

China finally usurped North America as the world’s biggest box office territory in 2020, generating an estimated $3 billion in ticket sales compared with about $2.28 billion stateside. All it took was a global pandemic.

It's official: North American box office revenue plummeted 80 percent in 2020 amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and unprecedented theater closures, while global revenue tumbled more than 70 percent. As predicted, domestic movie tickets sold between Jan.