“Iron Man 3″ is already a huge hit with audiences in China, but their reaction to the scenes inserted for the local version has been less than enthusiastic.
Auds at the Lumiere Pavilions cinema in downtown Beijing loved the film, which took a record $21.5 million on its opening day in China, laughing at Robert Downey Jr.’s humor and cheering his heavy metal antics on the bigscreen.
While “Django Unchained” was taken off mid-screening to have some gore and nude scenes cut, the Chinese version of “Iron Man 3″ had an extra four minutes added to boost the pic’s resonance with auds in the Chinese market, the second biggest in the world.
But auds have not warmed to the extra scenes. A piece of blatant product placement for a milk drink from Yili, an Inner Mongolia-based dairy, was greeted with guffaws.
And there was apparent incomprehension at the extra scenes featuring two new characters, Dr Wu and his assistant, played by top Chinese thesps Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing, respectively.
“There is no need for them. It’s like they wandered onto the wrong set. What is going on?” scoffed one viewer.