and vivid characters brought him a considerable success. He struck gold when improvements in the Russian economy permitted financing which revitalized a dormant domestic movie industry. The 2004 film Night Watch (Nochnoy dozor), based on the book, was regarded as "the first Russian blockbuster." The film grossed over $16 million in Russia, a box office record at that time. In the United States, an adaptation of the film was released by Fox Searchlight. The film Day Watch (Dnevnoy dozor) was released in Russia on January 1, 2006, and it was released in the US on June 1, 2007. He also released a number of sequels to the Watch series. In addition to the sequels, he published a short story Kid Watch (Melkiy dozor) featuring a teenage agent of the Day Watch who is also the son of a member of the Russian counter-intelligence service which monitors the Others. Since then, a number of other movie adaptations of his books have been considered. To date, only one of these projects, a 2005 children's film Asiris Nuna, based on Today, Mother!, a humor novella coauthored with Yuli Burkin, has been completed; several other movies, however, seem to remain in production. In many of these projects Lukyanenko acts as both scriptwriter and consultant. In the meantime, several other books have been released by him, such as the deeply philosophical, non-series novel Spectrum which deals with the themes of existentialism and omnipotence, among others. He also published a closely connected series, the novels Rough Draft and Final Draft. Foreign releases Until 2006 relatively few of Lukyanenko's works had been released outside of Russia, mostly in Baltic states, Bulgaria and Poland, countries with traditionally strong ties with Russian literature. Even fewer were commercially published in English. However, success of the movies finally changed the situation. Night Watch, translated by Andrew Bromfield, was published in English in July 2006, Day Watch followed in January 2007, Twilight Watch was published in July 2007. 2009 saw the international publication of Last Watch by Hyperion Press. Labyrinth of Reflections, published originally in 1997, was also translated and published in other languages. Literary analysis Lukyanenko himself said that his work has been heavily influenced by that of Robert A. Heinlein, the Strugatsky brothers and Vladislav Krapivin, and that he hopes to be remembered as a literary follower of the Strugatsky brothers. Although his books are often set in harsh worlds,