Word: harborful
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This was the gala Tokyo premiere last Thursday of the movie Pearl Harbor, which will open in theaters across Japan on July 14. Walt Disney Co. hopes the film will make close to $100 million in box-office receipts in Japan, which would help its bottom line after a relatively disappointing box office in the U.S., and explains why the company is spending a record $10 million to market it here...
...popular theme park, with 17 million visitors last year. Moreover, Japan is the world's second largest market for Hollywood films, and its moviegoers love action-packed adventures with romantic leads. They have contributed more than $200 million of Titanic's $1.8 billion global box office. But in Pearl Harbor, the villain isn't an iceberg--it's Japan. So Disney's marketing has had to be creative. "It's obviously a subject that must be approached with cultural sensitivity," says Dick Sano, Japanese head of the Tokyo office of Buena Vista International, the Disney unit distributing the film abroad...
Even with the changes, however, the film will open at a tricky moment in Japan. For many of today's Japanese, Pearl Harbor recalls not the surprise attack of a half-century ago but the accidental sinking of a Japanese fishing boat by a U.S. Navy submarine earlier this year. Japanese TV coverage of the film's U.S. premiere focused on the proximity of the Navy carrier on which the celebrations were held to the spot where the Ehime Maru was sunk. "I can't imagine why they had to hold it there, and so soon after the incident," says...
...Junichiro Koizumi, the new and hugely popular Prime Minister, is determined to restore national pride; he plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial, which most of his predecessors have avoided, that's controversial for heralding convicted war criminals as well as other war dead. A film like Pearl Harbor, says Koizumi's spokesman, Kazuhiko Koshikawa, is "quite fictitious and one-sided. Japan is portrayed as the enemy and wrong. The U.S. is portrayed as right...
...Being stuck in the Disney studio executive offices when the returns for "Pearl Harbor" roll in Can you say "bummer of epic proportions?" The $140 million Bruckheimer-Bay spectacular posted disappointing numbers at the box office. While Disney execs blame the movie?s long running time, we think the movie?s unsatisfactory performance may have had more to do with unbearable dialogue and a ridiculous subplot...