The domestic box office might be struggling to return to any sort of normality, and matters aren’t helped by the fact that the studios are still pulling their major releases from the calendar and moving them into 2021, meaning that even if people wanted to head down to their local multiplex in huge numbers, there’s hardly any new titles worth seeing anyway.
Things are looking much better internationally, though, where Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has compensated for a poor domestic showing by bringing in almost $250 million from foreign markets. Mulan may have bombed in China due in part to the controversy and subsequent media blackout that followed, but local production The Eight Hundred recently passed Bad Boys For Life‘s $424 million tally to become the highest-grossing movie of 2020.
There are hardly any big blockbusters hitting theaters for the rest of the year, though, meaning there’s a chance for smaller projects to swoop in and steal some of the headlines for themselves on the small screen. One such movie is Iron Mask, which boasts the combined star power of Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger in what looks to be an incredibly bizarre fantasy epic.
The $49 million co-production between Russia and China was actually released in the United States and United Kingdom in April of this year, where it swiftly vanished without a trace. It debuted in China last August where it also bombed, but Iron Mask is finally coming to digital and VOD on November 20th.
Trying to settle on a title proved to be a difficult task, and it’s been labeled as Viy 2: Journey to China, Journey to China: The Mystery of Iron Mask, The Mystery of Dragon Seal and just The Dragon Seal before the latest moniker was decided on. And while it remains to be seen how it’ll turn out, at least we know there will be a journey to China, an iron mask, a dragon seal and some kind of mystery involved.