Angelina Jolie's war film faces box office challenge in Asia

As the Oscar race goes into the home stretch, Universal is preparing to roll out its top contender, the highly anticipated second world war epic Unbroken. But even as it looks ahead to the movie's release worldwide, the studio is facing a complicated and rather delicate situation in two of its most critical foreign markets: Japan and China.

In Japan, Unbroken is bound to meet considerable resistance due to its depiction of the brutality in Japanese POW camps. In China, it will probably be welcomed with open arms - for the same reason.

Adapted by director Angelina Jolie from Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 nonfiction bestseller, Unbroken opens in the US on December 25. It chronicles the remarkable life of Olympic runner turned war hero Louis Zamperini, who survived the crash of his B-24 bomber in the Pacific, spent 47 days adrift on a raft, and then endured two and a half years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps before finally being liberated by US forces at the end of the war.

In the book, Hillenbrand depicts the treatment of the American and his fellow prisoners by sadistic Japanese corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe and other prison guards in harrowing detail. In the prison camps, she writes, "to abuse, enslave, and even murder a captive or POW was considered acceptable, even desirable".

Universal is still developing its strategy for the film's release in Japan, but Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairman Jeff Shell acknowledges that selling the movie there will be a challenge. "The content of the book is a difficult one in the Japanese market," he says. "We're probably going to wait a little bit and release it later in the year there than in the rest of the world. We're going to delay it a little bit so we can have a different kind of launch there."

(The film will be released in Hong Kong two months after it opens in the US.)