Justin Lin’s Latest More Slow and Somber Than Fast and Furious in China Debut
The star-studded Hollywood Adventures opened far below estimates with a $9 million opening day and $26-$27 million weekend, only 9th best 2015 debut among Chinese films.
There is something new that has occurred in China this week: two of the top four ranks at the box office have been claimed by non-Hollywood, non-English language pictures.
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China has become a sort of haven of second chances for films that disappoint in North America and Europe. Will it give Tomorrowland the ‘do-over’ that it needs?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2015/05/26/can-china-save-tomorrowland/
Follow me on Twitter @robcain or Sina Weibo @robcain, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Follow me on Twitter @robcain or Sina Weibo @robcain, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
China hold the key to Avengers: Age of Ultron’s global box office fate
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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz
April 13, 2015
Expectations were high among China’s movie biz pundits for Sunday’s opening of Furious 7, but no one came close to predicting the stunning drive-by looting the Universal release would commit at the country’s movie theaters. Prior Chinese box office records weren’t just beaten, they were throttled, smoked and thoroughly lapped by the skydriving thrillfest.
Furious 7’s opening day haul of 391 million RMB, or $63.1 million, doubled the previous opening day record of 194 million RMB set by Transformers 4 back in June of 2014 (Universal and the Hollywood trades are reporting somewhat higher numbers, but I haven’t yet seen these figures confirmed by official Chinese sources).
Furious 7’s midnight screenings likewise trounced the prior Transformers 4 midnight record of 20 million RMB ($3.3 million) with a new benchmark of 50 million RMB ($8.1 million).
The film’s opening day revenue also nearly equaled the Chinese receipts from the entire 4-week run of the franchise’s previous installment, Fast and Furious 6, which revved up 413 million RMB in 2013, good enough to place 11th in China for the year.
Perhaps most impressively, the film sold more than 10 million admissions in a single day, an attendance total that has been matched only a few times by modern day releases in North America, even though China has 40 percent fewer screens and less than half the seating capacity. What this means is that Furious 7 strained the PRC’s theaters to the limit by selling out a huge percentage of its 93,000 opening day screenings. And it completely squashed the competition, seizing a 92 percent share of the day’s box office revenue.
Furious 7 should easily race to a $200 million cume by around April 20th. What happens after that, and whether it can break Transformer 4’s all-time Chinese box office record of nearly 2 billion RMB and $320 million, will depend on its ability to hold up against a slew of competing releases in the next few weeks. These include:
Furious 7‘s surprisingly powerful start raises the bar on expectations for Marvel’s May 12th China release of Avengers: Age of Ultron. One of these movies or the other is likely to be the 2015 China box office champ. Up until last week the consensus for Avengers was for a $175 million to $200 million cume; now that figure looks relatively unimpressive.
A major question Furious 7‘s box office bonanza brings up is whether the Chinese film authorities at SARFT will deploy their market management tactics to actively crimp the returns of upcoming Hollywood releases, in order to save face for locally made Chinese films. Avengers has what appears to be a big advantage vis a vis Furious in that it faces no major competition for nearly a month after its release. Still, Marvel and Disney should hold off on making any victory laps until SARFT reveals its hand.
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
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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz
April 8, 2015
A Formula One race car. A California redwood tree. Superman. China’s box office.
Which one of these is not like the other?
A Formula One car can accelerate to 220 mph but it will eventually run out of gas. A redwood can grow tall and mighty but it will eventually reach its limit and topple to the ground. And Superman can’t keep flying forever—even he needs to take a break once in a while.
But the Chinese box office, like the Energizer Bunny, just keeps going and going and going. Two years ago I wrote in astonishment about the gravity-defying growth of the PRC’s movie business, and two years on the story just keeps getting bigger and better.
Fueled by a record-breaking February 2015 revenue haul which exceeded that of the U.S., and a March 2015 total that was 73 percent higher than the same period in 2014, aggregate PRC box office receipts for the first quarter of 2015 reached the unprecedented total of $1.54 billion. This is nearly 40 percent higher than the Q1 total in 2014, and more than China’s entire annual box office revenue of 2010.
If the trends of previous years hold, Q1 will account for about 22 to 24 percent of the year’s total gross. This would mean a year-end total somewhere between $6.4 billion and $7 billion. From there it will be just a few short years before China surpasses North America to become the world’s top box office territory.
Projected Annual Box Office, China vs. N. America, 2014-2020
Even by China’s extraordinary standards of economic growth, the rise of the movie business has been nothing short of astounding. Just ten years ago China’s moviegoers accounted for barely one in one hundred of all the world’s ticket sales. By 2020 they will purchase more than one in three. 
The impact of this massive growth is already being felt in the rest of the film world, with China becoming an increasingly important source of capital for films made in North America, Europe, and Asia. The global movie industry’s center of gravity is rapidly shifting across the Pacific from Hollywood to Beijing, and the key decisions about the types of films that are made, how and where they’re made, and who they’re made for are inevitably going to be heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.
Of the 70 films released during China’s first quarter this year, 23 grossed at least 100 million RMB (US $16 million), and four crossed the $100 million threshold. The revenue leader for the year so far is the Chow Yun-fat starring action-comedy The Man From Macau II, which collected $154 million for Bona Film Group. March’s box office winner was Disney’s animated hit Big Hero 6, which moved into the #2 spot among China’s all-time highest grossing animated features at $85 million, just behind Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2, which scored $92 million back in 2011. 
U.S.-made films captured a modest 29.5% of the market in the quarter, the lowest share in several years, though they will begin to make up ground this weekend when Universal’s Furious 7 rolls into PRC multiplexes. Still, given the growing ability of Chinese films to compete on their home turf with Hollywood fare—not to mention SARFT’s careful management of the market—it’s unlikely that American films will ever come close again to taking 50 percent of China’s ticket sales as they did in 2012.
A look at film performance by genre reveals a few noteworthy trends. While action-adventure remains the PRC’s most popular genre, it has given up ground to family and animation films, which have continued to expand their market base over the past several years. As the bulk of China’s new cinema construction shifts away from tier 1 and 2 cities to the hinterlands, and as the market starts to mature, audience tastes will continue to broaden. 
Coming soon: a look at China’s biggest male stars.
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
Follow me on Twitter @robcain or Sina Weibo @robcain, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
By Robert Cain for China Film Biz
January 14, 2015
The first full box office week of 2015 saw two studio film releases that spanned the spectrum of rankings from top to bottom: Fox’s Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb snagged the top spot with $26.5 million, while Sony’s Annie came in last among new releases with a hair-curling $355,000, possibly the poorest opening ever for a major Hollywood studio film in China.
Both Museum and Miss Granny, the Chinese remake of the Korean comedy hit of the same name (수상한 그녀) knocked Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain out of the number one spot, which it had occupied for the previous two weeks. With its $132 million total as of this writing, Tiger Mountain is now the 6th highest grossing Chinese language film of all time, and the 3rd biggest 2014 release after Breakup Buddies and The Monkey King.
Night at the Museum’s take is especially impressive considering that this is the first installment of that franchise to enjoy a PRC theatrical release. Its opening week numbers indicate a projected final gross north of $60 million, which should put it around the average for studio releases this year.
Annie, on the other hand, comes as a big surprise to the downside. Even taking into account its relatively modest release by China Film Group and Huaxia, with just 14,700 screenings during its first 3 days, the numbers are still mysteriously low, at just $23 per screening. By comparison, Khumba, a South African family animated film in its second week of release, earned more than double Annie’s average with $51 per screening. One wonders why Sony chose to use up a valuable release slot for the film, and even more, whether CFG and Huaxia put any effort into opening the picture.
Overall box office was strong at $80.4 million up 45 percent over the same frame in 2014. 2015 is off to a strong start after the blackout neutered December, with the first two weeks of this year running 46 percent ahead of last year.
Coming this week are the Jeff Bridges-Julianne Moore adventure vehicle The Seventh Son and the 3D reissue of Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle on January 16th, followed by The Hobbit: There and Back Again, which should clear at least $100 million if prior trends hold.
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 http://www.pacificbridgepics.com.
chinafilmbiz 中国电影业务 