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A teenager died in eastern Thailand Thursday morning while trying to imitate a comedic scene from Pee Mak, the wildly popular Thai romantic comedy, which has broken nearly every box office record in the country and still remains on release.
Anond Thongchai and two friends were taking a break at the fruit planation where they worked in Thailand’s Chanthaburi Province, when they got the idea to paddle a fiberglass boat out onto a nearby pond as three characters do in a memorable scene in Pee Mak.
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Once they were on the water, the boat began to leak and overturned, according to a report in local paper, the Bangkok Post. Anond, 17 years old, couldn’t swim and reportedly drowned before his friends could help him. Police recovered the body and the victim’s mother and cousin identified him, said the Post.
Pee Mak, still in release, is the highest grossing film ever at the Thailand box office, having earned $18 million (531 million baht) in five weeks. That total only includes Bangkok cinemas, however, as full-country figures won’t be available until mid-May. Producer GTH has said it anticipates the film might surpass the 1 billion baht mark country-wide ($33.7 million), once the final total is in – a feat no film, foreign or domestic, has ever achieved in Thailand.
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In the film, the title character Pee Mak (played by Thai heartthrob Mario Mauer) lives along a river and is visited by the ghost of his deceased wife. In one plot-progressing sequence, Pee Mak’s four goofball friends — whose antics are a big part of the film’s appeal — discover that his wife is a ghost and jump into a boat and paddle clumsily out into the river, going in circles and getting nowhere.
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