Kolobok

The Last Bogatyr: Kolobok opened in Russia today. To clear the way for it, showings of the new Spider-Man were pushed back two weeks, to August 20—and Spider-Man is not released in Russia legally at all. It plays on what the trade calls the shadow schedule. So an unlicensed screening of a Hollywood film was rescheduled to protect the opening of a Russian one.

For anyone who did not grow up on the story: Kolobok is the Russian cousin of the Gingerbread Man, a lump of dough with a mind of its own. An old couple bake a small round loaf and put it on the sill to cool. It comes alive, rolls out of the house, and on the road gets past a hare, a wolf, and a bear, singing a boastful song about everyone it has gotten past so far. The last animal it meets is a fox. She complains that her hearing is poor and asks him to sit on her nose and sing it louder. He sits down. The story ends there.

Putin likes it. Asked on his call-in show in June 2021 to name the works that had made the greatest impression on him, he gave three: War and Peace, Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, and Kolobok. He advised senior officials to reread the last one. Start taking flattery for the truth, he said, and you risk being eaten.

Now the reception. Before release the film was sitting at one star out of five on Kinoafisha. Within a day of opening, Kinopoisk took its score down altogether: around a thousand votes had come in, over ninety percent of them the lowest possible, and the site classified the wave as anomalous and set it aside. Moscow's only IMAX sold no tickets at all for any of its five premiere screenings. The film was made by the studio behind the franchise, together with the streaming service START and Rossiya-1, the state broadcaster.

The problem is not that the film is bad. When there is nobody to compete with and nobody is allowed to, you get exactly this: the money gets spent, the release date gets cleared, the film gets made, and the audience never enters the calculation.

I am going anyway. Their Kolobok came out infernal, some creature with eyes, and I do want to know what it does for 109 minutes.

Trailer: