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 still capable of occasionally putting out a film that can 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, additional commentary taken from the Russian Modern Film page of our Library.
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. «Мадагаскар 3» - Madagascar 3 - $42.7m
It's number one in America - and number one in Russia this month.
2. «Прометей» - Prometheus - $21.3m
In the original ancient Greek, the mythological titan Prometheus is actually "Prometeus." The "th" sound was added by English speakers who felt it easier to pronounce. French speakers, altering the name to their own preferred pronunciation, dropped the "s." Russian apparently took its pronunciation of the name from the French.
3. «Люди в черном 3» - Men In Black 3 - $19.2m (In June; total $36.2m)
As they have for the past two installments of the Will Smith blockbuster series, which have all been popular in Russia, the Russian distributors of Men in Black 3 chose a direct translation for marketing their film there.
4. «Белоснежка и охотник» - Snow White And The Huntsman - $10.2m
The retelling of the classic tale has been marketed successfully in Russia with a fairly direct translation of its name.
5. «Храбрая сердцем» - Brave - $5.4m
Apparently, the distributers for this film felt that simply calling the film "Храбрая," with a direct translation, was not descriptive enough for Russian audiences. The addition of "сердцем," which is "сердце," or "heart" in the instrumental case in Russian, changes the title to mean, roughly, "She is Led by the Heart to be Brave."
