The Eight Hundred has taken three billion yuan ($440 million) in takings at the box office, making it one of China's most successful ever films. The film is based on an infamous battle for a Shanghai warehouse between Chinese and Japanese soldiers.
The Eight Hundred has become not only the most successful film in China since cinemas reopened in July but among the top 10 all-time in the history of the People's Republic.
The real-life battle in 1937 on which it is based was between invading Japanese soldiers and around 800 men from the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT).
After the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War the KMT fought and lost a civil war against Mao Zedong's communist forces and ended up fleeing into exile in Taiwan, where the Republic of China remains in existence.
The film's premier in June was postponed after Chinese film censors edited some scenes to remove one particular scene in which the KMT soldiers defend the red, blue and white flag of the Republic of China on the roof of the Sihang warehouse.
The success of the film suggests movies based on famous battles are as popular in Asia as they are in the rest of the world. So what are the five best movies based on real battles?
Waterloo – 1970
Rod Steiger played Napoleon Bonaparte and Christopher Plummer was his nemesis – the Duke of Wellington – in Sergei Bondarchuk's classic.
Bondarchuk, one of the greatest film directors to emerge from the Soviet Union, had adapted…
