Hollywood delays disaster movies in Japan

Hollywood studios have postponed the releases of several films featuring images of mass destruction, flooding or entrapment. Photo / AP

A woman in a luxury hotel at an Asian beach resort goes for a wander - it's an idyllic and beautiful setting but there is something ominous in the air.

Suddenly, before she can get away to safety, a huge tsunami comes rolling towards her, sweeping up everything in its path.

Thus begins Clint Eastwood's recent film Hereafter. It is a spectacular and grim overture which inevitably has become very uncomfortable to watch for some audiences in the wake of last month's disasters.

Following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Hollywood studios have postponed the releases of several films featuring images of mass destruction, flooding or entrapment.

Hereafter (which had already been released) was quickly pulled from Japanese cinemas with Warner Bros conceding that certain scenes "were not appropriate".

Another movie held back was Sony's Battle: Los Angeles. In the New Yorker's words, this is "a quiet, uneventful chamber piece ... in which almost nothing happens except that a humongous army of homicidal aliens splashes down off the coast of California, marches ashore, annihilates every human in sight, and sets about sucking up water from the face of the earth".

Japanese audiences will also have to wait to see Universal's Australian-made 3D adventure drama Sanctum, in which an underwater cave diving team end up stranded after a freak tropical storm.

It's easy to see why such films have been delayed or taken out of theatres.

Showing them now would be tasteless, insensitive - and a very bad idea from the point of view of potential box-office.

But one irony about the decision to shelve these films is that Japanese audiences have always savoured disaster movies.

- INDEPENDENT