Category: Entertainment

The 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival has revealed its official competition, with 10 titles set to compete for the best film award.

The films selected represent 10 countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Poland. The winner will be chosen by the LFF awards jury.

Among the film are news works from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Sergei Loznitsa, Carol Morley, Lili Horvát, Benjamín Naishtat, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, Giovanni Tortorici, Malgorzata Szumowska, May el-Toukhy and Michal Englert and Rubaiyat Hossain. Star names among the casts include the likes of Aimee Lou Wood, Monica Bellucci, Mackenzie Davis, Rupert Friend and Johnny Flynn.

“As we celebrate the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival, it’s an honour to have a number of alumni filmmakers represented in the Official Competition alongside those making their first appearance at the festival,” said festival director Kristy Matheson. “Our 2026 competition selection brings an astounding array of filmmaking styles to the screen. As ever, it’s been creatively nourishing for myself and the team to encounter each of these works — we’re excited to share these with audiences in October.”

The 10 films in the official competition are:

“7 Miles Out” (UK, Dir-Scr. Carol Morley)  

Carol Morley (“Dreams of a Life,” “The Falling”) adapts her moving semi-autobiographical novel, which documents her adolescence in Stockport during the 70s and 80s. Morley’s film follows Anne, who struggles to come to terms with her beloved father’s suicide and finds escapism in the emerging of new-wave punk movement.

“Act 3” (Ireland-UK, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor)

The latest in Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s series of cinematic essays is a rich and thought-provoking journey through aging, legacy and the intersection between artistic and personal relationships. Molloy and Lawlor (“Baltimore,” LFF 2023) engage in a witty and moving conversation that explores family history and their latest project, a film about groundbreaking artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

“Glaxo” (Brazil-Argentina, Dir. Benjamín Naishtat)

An act of betrayal between a close group of friends has terrible consequences in Benjamín Naishtat’s atmospheric period-noir thriller. Four young men in the provincial Argentine city of Chivilcoy find their lives disrupted when a retired police officer and his glamorous young wife move into the area. Add two visiting American Mormons into the mix, along with a volatile political situation, and tensions soon escalate.

“Imperium” (Germany-France-Italy-Lithuania, Dir. Sergei Loznitsa)

Archival footage master filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa reframes Soviet history once again, via the revealing gaze of Italian cameramen who captured life there in the early 1970s. The footage Loznitsa uncovered at Rome’s Audiovisual Archive of the Labour and Democratic Movement left him marvelling at the contrast with official Soviet productions from the same era.

“Ketticè” (Italy, Dir. Giovanni Tortorici)

Following his debut with “Diciannove” (LFF 2024), Giovanni Tortorici continues his collaboration with producer Luca Guadagnino on this vibrant coming-of-age story, set in early 2000s Palermo. Giulio a dissatisfied 16-year-old, drifts through life with no enthusiasm for his education or his future, much to his family’s dismay (particularly his endlessly frustrated mother, brilliantly played by Monica Bellucci).

“Look Back” (Japan, Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Spanning more than a decade, Hirokazu Koreeda’s tender coming-of-age story follows two girls who bond over their passion for and dream of becoming manga artists. Fujino, a gifted artist and aspiring manga artist, meets Kymoto, a shy admirer of her work. Seemingly opposites, they create the perfect team with their shared love of the form. But as their work draws praise and attention, they find themselves confronted with decisions that threaten their artistic collaboration.

“My Notes on Mars” (Hungary-Austria, Lili Horvát)

In Lili Horvát’s beguiling third feature, the sudden return of Sam’s missing wife, who has no memory of anything except her scientific research, gives their relationship another chance. A talented scientist goes missing while hiking with her husband. Weeks later, she reappears at the family home but is not herself; all memories, save for those of her recent research on Mars, have mysteriously disappeared.

“The Difficult Bride” (France-Bangladesh-Portugal-Norway-Germany, Rubaiyat Hossain)

A bride-to-be wrestles with beauty rituals, social restrictions and supernatural forces as her dream wedding approaches, in this gripping feminist body horror from Bangladesh. Zaineen is very excited about her upcoming wedding. But she soon bristles under the many planned makeovers intended to make her thinner, fairer, sleeker and more bride-like. Resistance takes root in her body, and she experiences strange changes and omens.

“The Idiot(s)” (U.K.-Poland, Dir. Malgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert)

Aimee Lou Wood and Johnny Flynn play Anna and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s acerbic and joyful period film. Anna Dostoevsky loves her husband Fyodor. Fyodor loves his wife, but he also loves gambling and booze. Living in self-exile in Germany, Fyodor’s biggest obstacle to creative progress is himself. Anna tries desperately to rid him of his procrastination so he can deliver a new novel and they can avoid destitution.

“Woman Unknown” (Denmark-Latvia-Sweden, Dir. May el-Toukhy)

Marie, a young nanny and housemaid, is about to marry the wealthy older widower, Christian, for whom she is working. But Marie guards a shameful secret. During World War II, she was in an intimate relationship with a German soldier. Now Marie’s past threatens to catch up with her, and she is forced to do everything in her power to preserve her new status as lady of the house in post-war anarchy. 

The 70th BFI London Film Festival takes place from Oct 7 — Oct 18.

Iranian director Ali Asgari, who was in Venice Horizons last year with dark satire “Divine Comedy,” will soon be back — in competition this time — with his new feature “A Bit of Light.”

Variety is unveiling a first clip of the timely film, which is being sold internationally by France’s Salaud Morisset and released by Teodora Film Distribuzione in Italy.

Set in contemporary Iran, “A Bit of Light” follows a disillusioned doctor who, after being arrested and having his medical practice shut down, loses faith in the future. “Determined to end his life, he spends one final day visiting his siblings and mother to prepare them for his departure. Their compassion, care and companionship slowly reconcile him with reality,” says the film’s synopsis.

In the “A Bit of Light” clip, we see the film’s protagonist engage in conversation with someone who is helping him remove plants from a room amid the thumping sound of helicopter blades overhead.

“This Trump guy is threatening to bomb here every day,” the person helping the doctor says. “And these window panes are huge,” he adds. “God forbid they should shatter and hurt you.”

The film stars Misagh Zareh, Sadaf Asgari, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Ramtin Daghigh and Mina Rahimzadeh.

“A Bit of Light” marks Asgari’s sixth feature following “Disappearance” (2017), which also premiered in Venice; “Until Tomorrow” (2022), presented at the Berlinale; “Terrestrial Verses” (2023), selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard; “Higher Than Acidic Clouds” (2024), presented at IDFA; and “Divine Comedy,” in Venice Horizons last year. “A Bit of Light” is Asgari’s first film selected for Venice’s main competition.

“I have often wondered: when suffering becomes an inseparable part of our daily existence, what gives life its value? Can we ever separate our own existence from the lives of others? Are our choices truly only our own, or do they leave traces in the hearts and memories of those around us?” Asgari said in his directors’ statement.

“Living in Iran, where economic hardship, political uncertainty, and the constant shadow of war have become part of everyday life, I have witnessed how people continue to endure, to care for one another, and to create small moments of hope. Perhaps what allows us to keep going is not the absence of suffering, but the invisible connections that bind us together, the feeling that our existence is intertwined with the lives of others,” he added.

“‘A Bit of Light’ explores the fragile space between despair and the quiet forces that keep us connected to life. Through ordinary gestures and seemingly insignificant encounters, it reveals how meaning can emerge from the smallest moments: an act of kindness, a familiar presence, a shared silence, or the gentle touch of a mother’s hand,” Asgari continued.

“For me, this film is not a story about sorrow, but about the invisible bonds that make life worth holding onto. Suffering may never disappear completely, and life may remain filled with uncertainty and injustice. But perhaps the value of life has never depended on the absence of pain. Perhaps it lies in our ability to love, to be loved, and in the traces we leave behind in the lives of others,” the director concluded.

“A Bit of Light” is lead produced by Milad Khosravi’s Seven Springs Pictures. The film’s other producers are Sunny Independent Pictures, Zoe Films, Good Measure Productions, Haurvatat Film, MeMo Films,
Salt for Sugar Films and Avantika Singh Desbouvries.

Watch the clip below. The Venice Film Festival will run Sept. 2-12.

Found footage may be a fairly stale gimmick in horror these days, but the low-budget British indie “Snapshot” finds a way to freshen up the idea — and if that largely amounts to layering another technical gimmick over it, the results are nonetheless striking. Emulating the look of 19th-century pinhole photography, with the entire film presented in a circular 1:1 aspect ratio, this resourceful debut feature from director Joseph Archer and screenwriter-star Cathy Wippell turns the visual restrictions of that device to its advantage: This imagining of the well-trodden Jack the Ripper tale hinges heavily on what can’t be seen, as it follows a group of young Victorian women pursuing their own supernatural theory behind the killings terrorizing London, and the pioneering male filmmaker who takes it upon himself to document their efforts.

Viewers must swallow a certain degree of contrivance to go along with “Snapshot.” For one thing, it demands we accept that Tamworth (voiced by “All My Friends Hate Me” star Tom Stourton), the heard-but-not-seen inventor behind the camera, could have assumed a near fly-on-the-wall kind of presence in various unseemly locations through east London’s underbelly to have captured these revealingly candid reels. (Complete with leagues-ahead-its-time sound-recording technology, to boot.)

Introductory text informs us that this footage was discovered languishing in the (fictitious) “British Film Archive,” and Archer, also the film’s editor, deftly maintains a jumpy structural sense of reels rather crudely sequenced, with telling gaps between them. As DP, his visual approximation of early-cinema techniques, often wittily distressed, sometimes betrays his contemporary ones; the actors, likewise, slip in and out of period register. Still, if its illusion isn’t entirely complete, “Snapshot” is nonetheless an effectively eerie novelty, sure to attract attention in arthouse horror circles following its competition premiere in Edinburgh. Its next stop will be London’s genre-specific FrightFest later this month, but international festival programmers should take an interest too.

The morbidly lilting music-hall staple “Two Lovely Black Eyes” (“Only for telling a man he was wrong,” runs the follow-up lyric) recurs throughout “Snapshot,” becoming the defining musical theme in a story of female exploitation and exasperation in a society not yet rocked by the women’s suffrage movement. Tamworth, evidently a young man, appears sympathetic to the cause, spending much time in female company to chronicle the reality of their lives outside the sphere of patriarchal influence; still, as the film continues, the palpable shadow of the male gaze on proceedings becomes unnervingly hard to shake.

His key subjects include Minnie (Wippell, writing herself the juiciest role here), an intrepid, rebellious type who’s also something of a class tourist: Though raised in a well-to-do London family, she prefers to hang out with the sex workers and miscreants of the city’s working-class East End, where her close friend Fanny (Hazel Rogers) practices the oldest profession in the care of maternal madam Evelyn (Nadia Lamin). Of late, women like Fanny have been turning up dead in the area’s backstreets with alarming frequency; a climate of terror is setting in as the Ripper’s body count rises, but there’s still a living to be made.

In any case, Minnie and Fanny — along with other women in their circle — have become convinced that the killer is actually a phantom entity, and are determined to hunt the ghost down by patrolling his spooked environs and making spiritual contact with his dead victims — with Tamworth, of course, reliably on hand to make a permanent record of this plainly doomed project. As “Snapshot” becomes a queasily sustained exercise in waiting for the penny to drop, Archer and Wippell keep the story lean and the overt scares sparse, instead cultivating a more subtly pervading mood of disquiet and dread that aims to honor the everyday experience of women in this particular milieu.

“Snapshot” does risk feeling more like a very clever exercise than a fully realized narrative: Even with a tight 86-minute running time, the drama begins to spin its wheels a bit in the second half, while the characters have limited room to grow in this confined formal setup. But the payoff is mordantly effective, and the film’s fine sense of gallows humor gives it some welcome tonal breadth. It promises bigger, even more ambitious things from Archer, Wippell and their production outfit Silicon Gothic, and stakes out a commitment to horror filmmaking that doesn’t merely chase Hollywood trends, instead using both the resources and the cultural baggage on their doorstep.

The U.K.’s National Youth Theatre has announced a further wave of star names for “Letters to My Younger Future Self,” the one-night performance marking the organization’s 70th anniversary.

The show, supported by Netflix, is set for Sept. 20 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London.

The new names joining the lineup include chart-topper Sophie Ellis-Bextor, BAFTA Breakthrough Brit Susan Wokoma (“Enola Holmes”), leading dramatist James Graham (“Dear England”), Anita Rani (“BBC Woman’s Hour”), Daniel Ings (“The Gentleman”), Calam Lynch (“Rings of Power”), Fay Ripley (“Cold Feet”), Rhea Norwood (“Heartstopper”) and Megan Bolton (TikTok comedian). Additional letters will be penned by NYT patron Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joanna Lumley, Joan Collins, Richard E. Grant and Matt Lucas.

They join the previously announced lineup of BAFTA winner Adeel Akhtar (“Four Lions”), India Amarteifio (“Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story”), Fehinti Balogun (“Down Cemetery Road”), Jessica Henwick (“Game of Thrones”), Rob Rinder (“Judge Rinder”), Takunda Muzondiwa (2026 Roundhouse Poetry Slam winner) and Jack Thorne (“Adolescence”). Further appearances and letters are set to be announced.

The evening is directed by National Youth Theatre CEO and artistic director Paul Roseby alongside director Josie Daxter, with dramaturgy from Krishna Istha and Sophie Ellerby. Will Duke handles video design, Prema Mehta lighting design, Nicola T. Chang sound design and Matthew Wells movement direction. The show will be powered on stage, behind the scenes and on screen by young talent nurtured through Netflix and National Youth Theatre’s “Ignite Your Creativity” program.

NYT patron Sophie Ellis-Bextor said: “I’m proud to be a Patron of the National Youth Theatre, which gave me a great confidence boost as a young person and continues to do the same for thousands of young performers around the country.”

Wokoma added: “NYT shaped everything for me… I learned how to be a good company member and it’s absolutely one of my strengths as an actor and writer. It’s the way you learn and grow and surprise yourself.”

Ings said: “A lot of the people I’m closest to today are friends I made at NYT, and it shaped the way I approach acting and being part of a company. That being said, I have a lot to say to my younger self, so I can’t wait to be back with the NYT this September for a night to remember.”

Lynch added: “I’m looking forward to returning to my NYT roots for a special evening celebrating seventy years of youth theatre.”

Bolton said: “NYT is where I started my performing journey and is a company that means a lot to me. I’m looking forward to joining some amazing talent on stage for an evening to remember.”

Netflix has backed National Youth Theatre since 2023 through a partnership that has generated more than 4,000 free places aimed at steering young people toward behind-the-scenes creative careers. The charity points to its alumni roster as evidence that a majority of the U.K.’s top screen talent got their start in theater. That roster includes Daniel Craig, Helen Mirren, Adeel Akhtar, Andrea Riseborough, Matt Smith, Regé-Jean Page and Susan Wokoma, along with dramatists Jack Thorne, James Graham, Miriam Battye, Lennie James and Sarah Solemani, comedians Tom Allen and Joel Dommett, and musicians Ed Sheeran and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Tickets for “Letters to My Younger Future Self” are on sale now, with proceeds benefiting the national charity in its 70th anniversary year. National Youth Theatre named Netflix as headline sponsor of the event, with additional backing from Arts Council England and Eon Productions.

Deluxe Media Inc. and Tokyo-based Tohokushinsha Film Corporation have formed a strategic partnership to expand localization services across the Asia-Pacific region.

The non-exclusive deal pairs Deluxe’s ties to top studios and streamers, its scale and its tech-driven localization workflows with Tohokushinsha’s creative and in-market strengths built up over decades in Japan. Both companies said the aim is to add localization capacity as demand for high-quality localized content keeps rising across APAC and globally.

Deluxe has also opened a Japan office inside Tohokushinsha’s Tokyo headquarters, a move meant to tighten coordination between the two companies’ project teams. The companies said the setup has sped up response times and added flexibility as they work to keep pace with rising regional demand for subtitling, dubbing and localization work.

“Partnering with TFC strengthens our ability to deliver exceptional localization services across one of the world’s most dynamic entertainment markets,” said Cyril Drabinsky, CEO of Deluxe. “By combining Deluxe’s global capabilities with TFC’s deep expertise and trusted presence in Japan, we’re creating greater value for our clients and helping premium content reach audiences everywhere. We look forward to continuing to build on the strong foundation we’ve established together.”

Kosaka said the collaboration unites two companies with parallel commitments to quality and client service, adding, “As demand for premium localized content continues to grow, we’re proud to partner with Deluxe, whose global reach and relationships with the world’s leading studios and streaming platforms complement our decades of experience in the Japanese market. Together, we’re creating new opportunities to deliver exceptional dubbing, subtitling and localization services for clients in Japan and around the world. We are pleased with the progress we’ve made together and look forward to expanding our collaboration in the years ahead.”

Deluxe traces its roots to 1915, when it started out as a film processing lab. The company has since grown into one of the largest full-service media firms in the industry, handling localization, distribution and post-production work for studios, streamers and content creators around the world. Platinum Equity owns Deluxe.

Tohokushinsha dates back to 1961 and has long been a leader in Japanese localization work. The company has since branched out into production, broadcasting and distribution, linking international content with audiences in Japan. Its shares trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Standard Market, as well as the Nagoya Stock Exchange’s Main Market.

Hayden Panettiere, the former child actress who grew up onscreen before our very eyes, passed away Sunday at the age of 36. She died five days before her 37th birthday.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” her father Alan said in a statement. “She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her — and to the millions who watched her onscreen.”

While we are still awaiting a cause of death, Panettiere, who delivered her breakthrough performance at the age of 10 in “Remember the Titans” before starring in the NBC superhero saga “Heroes,” as fan favorite Kirby Reed in the “Scream” films and Juliette Barnes in the country music drama “Nashville,” had struggled for years battling drug addiction, alcoholism and depression, and suffered mightily at the hands of Hollywood. Panettiere chronicled her Hollywood highs and lows in her eye-opening memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” released May 19 of this year.

In the prologue to her book, she mentions the five stages of grief — and her belief in a sixth, floated by the author David Kessler in his book “Finding Meaning.” That stage is meaning, and Panettiere wrote that “my traumas have offered me meaning through a sense of humor, some ridiculous stories, prioritizing my health, a deeper relationship with my parents, pets I adore, animal rights and environmentalism that gives me purpose, and now, this book.”

She continued: “All the heartaches I’ve endured have allowed me to come to a place of empathy and understanding for everything my loved ones have come up against and — most importantly — for myself. They’ve also given me determination. I’m like Dory, the resilient little fish in ‘Finding Nemo,’ who ‘just keeps swimming’ even when she comes face-to-face with a bunch of sharks.”

Raised in Palisades, New York, Panettiere landed a series of commercials — the first at only eleven months old — before landing a role in the soap opera “One Life to Live” at the age of five. She described herself as a “willful child” who wouldn’t be bossed around; a “tomboy” with a big head of curly hair and a “spunky, sassy attitude.” There are plenty of bright moments in her book, like the time she tossed a football around with Denzel Washington on the set of “Remember the Titans” — a movie-making experience she called “the happiest I’d ever felt as an actor” — and disappointing ones, such as losing a role in “Panic Room” to Kristen Stewart after Nicole Kidman had backed out of the film due to injury. She shared intimate details about her family life, like the time her mom discovered her father was having an affair and the destructive impact it had on their family dynamic; her complicated relationship with her stage mom-mother, a former soap opera actress; and being overcome with grief after losing her beloved brother and confidant, Jansen, to heart complications in 2023.

But the moments from “This Is Me: A Reckoning” that stuck with me the most concerned the many ways she was targeted by Hollywood predators.

There was the “important executive at NBC” who kissed her on the lips at a party in 2008 while she starred on his network’s hit show “Heroes,” or the time that a star-studded apartment party in Los Feliz took a turn for the appalling when an “Oscar-winning actor and director” cornered a 19-year-old Panettiere as she was about to leave and tricked her into staring at his exposed testicles with the line, “There’s a big wad of gum on my pants.”

“I looked down and recoiled,” she recalled in the book. “This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly… Up to that moment, men in Hollywood had always been kind and respectful around me. There may have been a peck on the lips here and an inappropriate comment there, but nothing had crossed a line.”

And that line kept getting crossed, again and again. One of the most shocking incidents occurred when Panettiere was 18 and an actress-friend, who she calls Stella in the book, invited her to a yacht party in the South of France. Stella ushered her down into the bowels of the ship and to a cabin where a “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter” lay naked in bed, his bottom half covered in sheets.

“I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick,” Stella told Panettiere, who subsequently panicked, writing, “My thoughts were a blur, but I’d spent my life trusting that others had my best interests at heart. Being ‘managed’ was routine, to the point where I lost faith in my intuition. I could feel my heart pounding. As I settled in underneath the sheets, I disassociated. My body no longer felt like my own.” Then, her “survival instinct kicked in” and she managed to escape before anything happened.

The Hollywood crowd proved so off-putting to Panettiere that she found herself drawn to the former heavyweight champion boxer Wladimir Klitschko, who is currently helping defend his country of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, because of how un-Hollywood he is. The two share a daughter, Kaya.

As Panettiere told People, when she was only 15, someone on her team began plying her with “happy pills” before she walked red carpets. “They were to make me peppy during interviews,” Panettiere said. “I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction… As I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without.”

Her battle with drugs, alcohol and depression led to an eight-month rehab stint in 2020, where she wrote candidly about the painful effects of withdrawal on her body and mind.

“As my nervous system tried to regulate itself without the depressant effects of alcohol, it went into overdrive, and my whole body shook, I couldn’t sleep, and my head pounded like it was pressing against my skull… A doctor told me that if I didn’t stop drinking, I’d be dead within five years,” she recalled in her book.

Whatever her cause of death is, one thing is certain: Hollywood failed to protect Hayden Panettiere. Hopefully, her death will serve as a reminder to the industry’s powers that be that young girls and women need to be heard, need to feel safe, and need to be shielded from its more sordid characters.

I’ll leave you with a portion of the final chapter of Panettiere’s memoir, which she named “One Final Thought”:

“Radical acceptance has taught me to walk hand in hand with my triumphs and my tragedies because they’ve made me who I am. And today, I really love that person. If there’s anything I can offer you with this book, it’s my hope that you do the same.”

Dirty Monkeys’ war comedy-drama “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” took command of the mainland China box office during the Aug. 14–16 weekend, grossing RMB477.9 million ($70.3 million) over the three-day frame, according to data from Artisan Gateway.

Following its Tuesday, Aug. 11 rollout and earlier previews, the production has amassed a cumulative total of $134.1 million. Directed by Wen Muye (“Dying to Survive”) from a screenplay co-written with Lang Qunli and Wei Zhong, the film stars Shen Teng as a Chinese chef who moves to the Middle East to open an eatery to pay off family debts. Alongside his floor manager, played by Jiang Qiming, their business turns into an unexpected sanctuary for local civilians and children when armed conflict erupts. The cast also features Aarif Rahman and Omar Sherif. From the Imax screens left over from the saturation “The Odyssey” release, “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” collected $2.1 million.

Universal’s Christopher Nolan epic “The Odyssey” debuted in second place, pulling in $28.4 million across its official three-day opening weekend. Bolstered by early previews, the tentpole has reached a cumulative $35.9 million in the territory. The 20,000 screen Middle Kingdom release followed a high-profile Beijing promotional tour and secured an extensive Imax footprint across the country. Including previews, the Imax cume is $19.3 million in China and the company said that this marks the biggest opening weekend ever for a Christopher Nolan film in China, both in Imax box office and Imax indexing.

Pearl Studio’s animated fantasy feature “All Wishes Come True!” moved to third position in its fifth weekend, taking in $13.1 million. Directed by Mu Zhengyang, the mythological comedy has accumulated $235.9 million since its July 18 debut, tracking eight ordinary mortals who combine their wit to outsmart celestial deities and earn the mantle of the Eight Immortals.

Sony’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” placed fourth in its third full weekend, collecting $9.9 million. The film has reached a cumulative total of $209 million since launching on July 29, continuing its run as the top-grossing Hollywood import in China this year.

Enlight Pictures’ animated fantasy romance “To Your Island” held onto fifth place, taking $2.6 million in its sophomore frame for a cumulative total of $15 million. Directed by Zhou Haoran and adapted from Fan Dawang’s popular web novel, the story follows a young woman led by a paper crane to a mysterious island, where she reconnects with her former boyfriend, who has lost his memories and been transformed into a rabbit.

Mainland China’s overall weekend grosses reached $132.9 million, while the 2026 year-to-date revenue stands at $3.79 billion, down 30.4% from the same period in 2025.