Like most places in the world, Russia’s silver screens are dominated by Hollywood’s global blockbusters. Russia’s film industry has struggled with the financial crisis, but is also capable of producing films that can occasionally compete locally with the American machine. Once a month, SRAS provides a lineup of the top five movies in Russia by box office take—with the official Russian-language trailers from YouTube and, for those Russian films on the list, links to our Russian film site.
Below are films listed with their English and Russian titles (note that they differ sometimes), as well as how much the film has earned over the calendar month.
1. Ной—Noah—$16.5m (in April; total $33m)
In Russian Bibles, Noah is known as “Noi.” The original Hebrew is “Noach.”
2. Первый мститель: Другая война—Captain America: The Winter Soldier––$15m
American action films often do well in Russia, even those that feature, as they often do, Russians as the bad guys. In this instance, however, the marketers for the latest Captain America film have chosen to downplay the role of the Russian villain, changing the subtitle to the more vague “Another War” (Другая война).
3. Новый Человек-паук: Высокое напряжение—The Amazing Spider-Man 2—$9.4m
Although the film is being marketed in America with no subtitle, the Russian marketers, as they often do, have chosen to add a subtitle to the sequel. In this case, it emphasizes the role of the bad guy—“High Voltage” (Высокое напряжение).
4. Дивергент—Divergent—$6.3m
Here the Russian marketers have taken advantage of a single-word title that directly transliterates between the two languages.
5. Рио 2—Rio 2—$5.5m (in April; total $26.5m)
Animated films often do well in Russia, even as dacha season starts to eat into box-office profits. The same is true for this new film about love birds in Rio de Janeiero (Рио де Жанейро).
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