Hero (film)

Hero ({{zh-cp|c=英雄|p=yīng xióng}}) is a film first released in China on October 24 2002. It was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing motion picture in Chinese cinema history. It hit US theaters on August 27 2004 despite the fact that the Asian DVD had already been available for over a year. It became the top-grossing film in the first week of its US debut, at US$18M, and continued to lead the US box office in its second week at US$11.5M. It fell to the fourth place in its third week at US$4.4M. It set a record as the highest-grossing opening-weekend foreign language film in the United States. The US edition of the DVD, with Mandarin, English, and French sound tracks, was released on November 30 2004.

Criticism

There has been some criticism of the film for its American-release translation of one of the central ideas in the film, tian xia. In this version, the term is translated as "our land", while the term has much broader cultural and linguistic connotations in Chinese, closer to "the world". As, however, China was held at the time of this phrase's introduction and use to be the whole world, the matter isn't clear cut.

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