Monday, May 04, 2009

how soon for a bottleg to hit the streets in HK?

I once conducted a little experiment in charting Chinese bootleg DVD ETAs. My office is down the street from Toronto's Chinatown and when Jet Li's FEARLESS got released in China, I began counting the days until I saw it for sale in the vendor stalls that hawk the 4 DVDs for $10. It took just under a week until a copy was for sale. No English subtitles, but the quality was remarkably crisp.

When I was in Hong Kong in March for Filmart and the HKIFF, I got to see the premiere of the Derek Yee directed Jackie Chan film, THE SHINJUKU INCIDENT at the Festival and the following week it got its theatrical release. Well, Fredric Ambroisine stuck around after I left and he took note of when the bootleg hit the streets. Read his observations of the interesting and remarkable pro packaging over at his blog on alivenotdead.com