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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

September 4, 2012

Pent-up demand for Hollywood blockbusters powered China’s box office to its second-highest grossing frame ever last week, as The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises attracted nearly equal numbers of moviegoers in their long-awaited China debuts. Both pictures started slowly last Monday but drew better than I had expected throughout the week, finishing up with $35.9 million and $34.8 million respectively, good enough to notch the sixth and seventh best full-week totals of 2012.

Both pictures were handicapped in at least two ways: each had been in release for at least a month in the rest of the world, a lag that usually allows DVD and online piracy to severely impact the Chinese grosses, and the two films were pitted against each other on the same opening date by China Film Group’s release schedulers, forcing most filmgoers to choose one film over the other.  But after being starved of major live action tent-poles for most of the summer (due to a SARFT-imposed blackout of most Hollywood movies), Chinese audiences came out in huge numbers to drive a $76.7 million weekly aggregate, the highest nationwide gross since mid-April, when Titanic 3D earned $74 million and led the PRC’s theaters to a record $83.6 million weekly total.

Their reward for waiting out the blackout is that Spider-Man, Dark Knight and Prometheus will enjoy several weeks without competition from any other new Hollywood releases, and they should perform well into late September, when the National Day holiday will see the rollout of several Chinese language blockbusters.

In reviewing the box office figures of the past several weeks, one thing that is abundantly clear is that even when Chinese films are protected from foreign competition, they’re unable to generate enough interest to keep China’s multiplexes busy. Although there is an occasional Painted Skin or Silent War to draw meaningful crowds, China’s studios are still making far too few commercially attractive films to earn the 50 percent domestic box office share that SARFT expects of them.

Year-to-date China has passed the $1.7 billion mark, and with four months to go it should easily reach $2.5 billion by December. Whether it can overcome the damage done by SARFT’s blackout and reach the magic $3 billion level this year will depend largely upon whether Chinese audiences show up for home-grown hopefuls like director Li Yu’s Fan Bingbing starrer Double Xposure, Feng Xiaogang’s 1942, Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and other Chinese language tent-poles.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com