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Lost in the Stars: Chinese Remake of 1976 US TV Movie a Big Hit

Lost in the Stars, a Chinese movie that remakes a forgotten US TV movie from the 1970s has made more money than The Flash and Indiana Jones.

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Lost in the Stars, a Mainland Chinese mystery thriller that remakes a forgotten American network TV movie from the 1970s, has now made $379 million at the box office, making it one of the biggest summer hits of 2023. This was only its second weekend, and it has already made more money than both The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny combined.

Lost in the Stars: Chinese Remake of 1976 US TV Movie is a Huge Hit
"Lost in the Stars" still courtesy of As One Production / Alibaba Pictures

Lost in the Stars is a Chinese remake of a 1990 Russian feature film called Trap for a Solitary Man, which was an adaptation of a French stage play by Robert Thomas. The play was actually made by American television networks into TV movies several times, starting in 1969, with the most well-known version from 1976 entitled One of My Wives is Missing, which starred 1960s and 1970s TV mainstay James Franciscus and Quincy's Jack Klugman. It was made again into a 1986 TV movie called Vanishing Act starring Elliot Gould. The plot involved a man at a resort town reporting to the police that his wife has gone missing, only to have another woman show up claiming to be his wife, and his increasing paranoia as he becomes convinced there's a vast conspiracy against him. Either he's losing his mind, or this is a major case of gaslighting.

Lost in the Stars is written by Chen Sicheng, who is also behind the hit Detective Chinatown movies, and co-directed by Liu Xiang and Cui Rui. The Chinese movie is set in a resort town in Thailand where Chinese tourists like to visit and play up the noirish production values and Hitchcockian suspense and melodrama to put the hero through the wringer. There's a reason the plot keeps getting remade as its twists and turns seem to endure through the decades, as we wrote about earlier. There is a minor cult around the TV movie One of My Wives is Missing amongst everyone who saw that production. It is currently streaming on Prime Video. Lost in the Stars is getting a limited release in North America on July 7th.

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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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