Mark Chao’s New Film Gets Pulled from Theaters
Chinese film The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity <晴雅集>, starring Mark Chao (趙又廷) and Deng Lun (鄧倫), was pulled from theaters due to plagiarism allegations. Originally scheduled for an international release on Netflix’s platform on February 5, it is unclear what the next steps are for the streaming website.
Although the movie was in theaters for only 10 days, it already earned 400 million Chinese yuan, and would have continued reaping earnings if the run date were not cut short. The film company is uncertain whether The Yin-Yang Master will be able to return to theaters again, so the chances of earning a profit are quite low especially against the original investment of CNY 300 million.
Screenshots of Mark Chao casting his spell in The Yin-Yang Master circulated online and many netizens claimed that the scenery, overall appearance, as well as the spell itself greatly resembled popular American movie, Doctor Strange.
This is not the first time director and popular author Guo Jingming (郭敬明), who was behind The Yin-Yang Master, was caught with plagiarism claims. He recently officially apologized for plagiarizing a novel in his career.
Receiving excellent praise for his performance in 2017 popular drama Eternal Love <三生三世十里桃花>, Mark reduced his workload to spend more time with wife Gao Yuanyuan (高圆圆) and their daughter. Mark was offered two leading roles in grand production movies, Saturday Fiction <蘭心大劇院> and The Yin-Yang Master. Originally supposed to be released in 2019, Saturday Fiction’s release date is still undetermined. With the removal of The Yin-Yang Master from movie theaters, Mark has been absent from film screens for two years.
“The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” Trailer
Source: Ettoday
This article is written by Su for JayneStars.com.
@ su – thanks for the article. I think you have misspelled the 2nd actor’s name > Deng Lun.
Wow, now I see how much it rips off Dr strange, lol! Yup, Chinese fantasy has never had teleport gates, nor do they have circle shield while hand is circling around. Those are basically special moves from Dr strange universe *facepalm*. At least this would stop Chinese movies from blatantly copy western movies (remember those elvish crowns from TLoTR, or those pointy ears xD?).
@littlefish Is the translation accurate? He had to apologize for plagiarizing earlier works. I read that GJM actually bought the rights to Yin Yang Master from the Japanese author who was influenced by Tang Dynasty culture.
@msxie0714 Yu Mama lost the court case, he paid the damage to Chiung Yao. As part of the lost, he meant to also publicly apologise to her, but he never follow up. As a matter of fact, he just ignored it until now, only after 100+ writers did a public boycott against him and GJM.
Also same with GJM, it’s not about the current movie, ying yang master, that he got into trouble with. It’s about the previous works he done, which clearly plagiarised, got called out, and again, didn’t want to publicly apologise for it.
The thing about cinema and TV stations start taking their series off is because 1 – the government is really going in on this. 2 – like FBB, the glaring obviously cases will be the martyr/sacrificial lamb so people know to not do that
Haha it’s China, that’s what they’re best at right :P? Although surprised they actually pulled it…
@exodus Haha… Hollywood copied HK wireworks and martials arts. Princess Leia’s double buns was copied from ancient Chinese hairdo. some of the other Starwars female characters copied Mongolian hair pieces and Chinese hanfu.
@msxie0714 More like borrowed right 😉 Plus it’s Star Wars, so they’re obviously trying to incorporate different cultures in different worlds…so ya know…
@exodus
so it’s ‘borrowed’ if someone else does it, but ‘copied’ if China does it. Just like someone else’s freedom fighter is your terrorist.
@msxie0714 just to further my point on why GJM is still bad/how Chinese just copy Hollywood ideas blatantly. Take the ying yang master movie, if you look at the trailer, which is in the other article I think, it shows how mark chao’s character was basically doing all spells with circles. Ok, so we all know ying yang, but the circle design look more like dr strange’s circle than anything we see in China. And yes, dr strange and the whole series is about Asian culture, so that’s why you can see the Asian root there. But again, before dr strange, have you see anything like that in Chinese drama? No.
In Chinese fantasy series, we don’t have portals. We have teleportation, where a person blink and appear in a different spot, you can bring a companion if you hold on to that person. You can argue that the lack of advancement in technology resulting in them only able to do blink, and not portal. But to use the same circle like dr strange to open a portal to go through a different place, this is the first I have ever seen in Chinese fantasy series!
And next one is shielding of incoming attacks, in Chinese dramas, we always either use a flying object and use force behind it to shield off attacks or use force (no true physical form of the force) to hold it off. We don’t have a circle spell to shield it off ever!!!! Look, I will not be pissed if he has use a triangle shield. Or an oval gateway for portal. But he’s literally being lazy, he copy every moves from DR strange! Just because Dr strange gets inspired by Asian/Chinese culture, doesn’t make it ok for GJM to copy every moves to the T without an ounce of originality to it!!!
@msxie0714 I’m joking hence the winking. Get a sense of humor. Could careless if they did or didn’t copy Strange. Although it is interesting that they pulled the movie from theaters. Is it because they don’t want to piss off/disrespect marvel/disney if so that’s a first then it seems like.
@msxie0714 Uhm, that’s not copyright >_> hairstyles and fashion trends are part of life. so what if it looks like Chinese costumes, with Chinese being the largest population in the world, is it surprising that later on, far far away in the future their influences are not left behind?
If you want to argue that Hollywood copy China, let me just remind you how blatantly they copy TLotR’s elven hair pieces, they even copy the pointy ears into their Fox demon series. The difference between Hollywood copying and Chinese copy is 1 actually put thoughts into it, and try to respect it (at the beginning might not be so, but overtime, with public pressure, they did), whereas the other 1 is just out right copy it, doesn’t respect it, and if being called out, totally ignored it, and lie about it, while continually copy it again and again! (Yes they might have paid the Hollywood dude to do the hair pieces for the fantasy ice series but again, originality is zero! They literally tell the dude I’m paying you for the right to use what similar to TLotR stuff, take the money, you don’t need to work and we get to use it.)
With martial art, it’s a type of movie genre. Are you telling me that Japanese can only do anime and no one else in the world can do anime now??? Chinese will only able to do period costume drama, while the west can do all the sci-fi, and zombie movie >_>?
And with the wire work, again, technical stuffs, should China not incorporate the west’s latest advances in camera and other technologies and ideas on how to film certain stuffs?
There is the right way to obtain and use the knowledge and ideas, and there is the wrong way of doing it. I have always look down on China because they have never tried to do anything to fix this problem. But now they have, and they themselves know it’s a problem and that’s why they are fixing it and I applaud them for it.
Hehe it’s Deng Lun 邓伦 .