Trivia / Monster Hunter (2020)

• Banned in China: The film was flooded with negative reviews and pulled from theaters after a Chinese character made a pun about "Chi-knees", which was reminiscent of the "Dirty Knees" schoolyard rhyme used by Americans to insult Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $60 million. Box office, $15,104,790 (domestic), $40,783,539 (worldwide, excluding China). This attempt by the husband-wife duo of writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich to follow up their Resident Evil Film Series with another adaptation of a Capcom game series received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics and fans of the game series, though general audiences were more accepting of it. It predictably did weak business stateside and in most other countries, what with being released in the middle of the still-ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, but what real sealed Monster Hunter’s fate was when China, a notable market for the Resident Evil films whose movie industry was getting back on track after dealing with the pandemic, pulled the movie from wide release only a couple days into its run after audiences were offended by a perceived racist joke made by one of the characters, resulting in it falling a third short of its budget worldwide.
• Dueling Works: This movie came out the same year as Love And Monsters, as both movies involve hunting monsters.
• International Coproduction: An American-British-Chinese-German-Japanese co-production. Despite being coproduced by Chinese company Tencent Pictures, the film still ended up getting Banned in China due to a joke that was racist to Chinese audiences.
• Late Export for You: Was released in the UK on June 18th, 2021, six months after it's US release on December 18th, 2020.
• Release Date Change: Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the film was moved back from September 4, 2020 to April 23, 2021, then later moved back up to December 30, 2020. After Wonder Woman 1984 was announced as a day-and-date digital release, Monster Hunter was then moved forward to December 25th, then finally crept forward to December 18th. It's speculated that the reason it moved back into 2020 was due to the previous Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich video game movie, 2017's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, having been a huge hit in China (where the theatrical industry largely recovered from the pandemic by mid-2020) despite flopping in the United States. This became troublesome, however, when Monster Hunter was pulled from Chinese theaters over a line deemed racist by many viewers, nuking its primary market. The line was subsequently cut from all future releases of the film as the actor apologized on his social media feeds.

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