All of the previous installments in both The Fast and The Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises will screen in the out of competition section of this year’s Beijing International Film Festival, it was announced this week.
The inclusion of the first four movies in Disney’s Pirates franchise is the surest sign yet that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales will score a release in the world’s second-largest film market.
Disney shared a poster and a trailer for the upcoming film on its official Weibo account this week, in another sign the film is heading for the Chinese market. The previous Pirates movie, On Stranger Tides, earned RMB 476 million ($69 million) in China in 2011.
Joining the movie marathon are the first seven films in The Fast and The Furious franchise. This week, The Fate of the Furious nabbed a coveted day-and-date release for Friday, April 14, in a day-and-date release with North America.
Last year, the first seven Star Wars films in that franchise were screened at BJIFF, priming local audiences for the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that eventually came out in January this year.
The seventh edition of the state-run event will be held April 16-23 and will again include a project pitching section, a conference series, and a film market.
Themes for the festival’s exhibitions will center on film genres rather than countries this year, according to local reports. There will also be a focus on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pet geopolitical project “One Belt, One Road.”
A record-breaking 712 projects were submitted for the pitching section, with 21 of those coming from countries outside of Greater China, including the United States, France, Germany, Japan, India, Canada, and Malaysia.
The bulk of the submissions come from young filmmakers in their twenties or thirties, according to the festival’s website. The Film Market “Project Pitches” event will be held from April 19-21.
The pitches span a variety of genres and styles including comedy, romance, youth, science-fiction, and suspense. Previous award-winning projects such as My Beloved Bodyguard and Mountain Cry went on to be developed into feature films.
A special retrospective of the late Italian cinema great Michelangelo Antonioni’s work will also screen at the festival this year. Works by the Italian master screened at the festival are set to include Deserto Rosso, Blow-Up, L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, and Beyond the Clouds.
In January, it was announced that Netflix’s elephant conservation documentary The Ivory Game had scored an official selection slot at the festival.
Over 500 movies will be shown in 29 different cinemas across the capital starting from April 8 and ending as the festival wraps up.