Another rumble in the jungle

Alexander Skarsgard and Australian actress Margot Robbie meet Chinese fans in Beijing last week.[Photo provided to China Daily]

For another scene, where Tarzan encounters an elephant, which was once his close friend, and has tears in his eyes, Skarsgard used a tennis ball to enact the scene.

Skarsgard spent eight months training to build his sculpted physique for the film.

"Every muscle is there for a reason. Wild animals cannot waste energy on excess muscles," he says.

For the film, Skarsgard also had to work on getting to know actress Margot Robbie.

Revealing how they worked that out, Robbie says: "We met six months before the filming began. As the director wanted the Tarzan couple to have a natural chemistry on screen, we started hanging out immediately."

Known for her role in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie says the new Tarzan film gives her the opportunity to play a "tougher" Jane than in most Tarzan versions made in past decades.

Despite being an upper-class lady in Victorian England, her independent and tough personality makes Jane more relatable to modern audiences, says Robbie.

"Tarzan is an orphan raised by a gorilla mother, and the first female human he meets is Jane," says Robbie. "So, he needs her more than she needs him."

But the question for Warner Brothers, which earned less in China last year than its Hollywood rivals Universal and Disney, is whether Chinese audiences need Tarzan.

The answer is not clear yet, but Tarzan has surprisingly found a niche in China's summer screening schedule typically dominated by domestic titles.