by Robert Cain for China Film Biz
The 20 year-old franchise is on solid ground in China.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2015/08/01/chinas-national-summer-blackout-is-a-roaring-success/
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.
By Robert Cain for China Film Biz
November 21, 2013
Having already clinched bragging rights as the top-grossing Hollywood studio in China this year, Warner Bros further cemented its lead with the excellent rollout of Gravity on Tuesday. With nearly $10 million in ticket sales in its first two days of PRC release, and what I’m estimating will be at least a $70 million final tally, Gravity should push Warners’ 2013 total in China to around $325 million.
This will mark the first time I can remember when Warners will have won the China box office crown. It will also reflect an impressive 80 percent revenue boost over Warners’ respectable, albeit distant second-place finish to Fox in 2012. With such box office hits as Pacific Rim, Man of Steel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and now Gravity, Warners will average about $54 million in ticket sales per picture.
Second place in the studio derby this year will go to Disney, whose Marvel superhero offerings Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 will account for around $175 million of that studio’s $250 million annual take.
Sony and Fox will finish third and fourth, respectively, with Fox falling off precipitously from its record-holding $376 million China gross in 2012. Sony had only one strong release with Skyfall back in January, but it was able to get more films into China than any other studio and in aggregate managed to cobble together more than $200 million in gross revenue. Although Fox got solid results in 2013 from The Croods (a Dreamworks animated picture) and Wolverine, it couldn’t match the huge numbers of last year’s Titanic 3D, Life of Pi and Ice Age 3 and wound up with less than half of last year’s gross with around $176 million.
Universal and Paramount, the two studios with the least active presence in China, received the fewest import quota slots and grossed the least among the majors, with about $159 million and $129 million respectively.
At last week’s box office, U.S. films captured the top three slots, although two of these were buyout films. Thor: The Dark World and Escape Plan won the top two spots for their second week in a row with $24.9 million and $13.3 million, respectively. New entry Red 2 picked up $5.9 million in its first three days, enough to handily beat the $4.9 million that Red collected during its entire run in 2011. Total nationwide box office was $54 million for the week, a 57 percent increase over the same period last year.
U.S. films will see another week or two of relative prosperity before the year-end Chinese tent-poles move in and grab all the spoils in December and January. Look for big results from The White Storm, which releases on November 29th, followed by big December debuts from No Man’s Land, The Four 2, Firestorm, Personal Tailor and Police Story. By year’s end, Hollywood movies will land only 2 of the top 10 spots at China’s box office in 2013, down from 7 last year and 6 in 2011.
In aggregate, U.S. distributors will manage only a meager 5 to 6 percent increase in their China sales this year, a mere fraction of the 60 percent gain that Chinese language films have enjoyed. Hollywood has let yet another year go by doing little more than lobbing movies into China from across the Pacific, and it has paid the price with a precipitous drop in market share.
Meanwhile, aggressive non-Chinese players like Australia’s Village Roadshow and Korea’s CJ Entertainment have stepped into the breach with highly successful Mandarin language co-productions. And local Chinese players are rapidly growing in competitive strength, as exemplified by Huayi Brothers’ massive increase in its stock market capitalization to $5.2 billion from only $1 billion a year ago. Many of these companies have established beachheads in the U.S., and it won’t be long before their growing financial strength in China will enable them to compete effectively with the stodgy U.S. studios and further erode their diminishing dominance of the global film market.
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.
by Robert Cain for China Film Biz
June 18, 2012
Hollywood’s studios are all benefitting from China’s box office boom, but they’re not benefitting equally. Some have been much more effective than others at getting their films into Chinese movie theaters, and their financial results from China distribution have varied widely. The top grossing major studio, Paramount, has over the past couple of years earned more than four times as much from its China releases as the sixth place studio, Universal.
Hollywood needs to pay close attention to how it’s doing in China, and to invest time and energy to figure out how it can do better there. While there are certainly other important territories, none comes close to matching China’s torrid growth and rapidly swelling global importance. The analysis presented below provides what I hope is a valuable snapshot, and a few useful insights, about where American distributors stand in China today.
To conduct this analysis I reviewed the box office results of the more than 60 American films that were released in China during the nearly 18 month period from January 1st, 2011 through June 10th, 2012. These included both revenue-sharing ‘quota’ films and ‘flat fee’ imports. I classified each film as belonging to a single U.S. distributor—a task that was not as easy as it sounds, because quite a few films are released by one company in the U.S. and by an entirely different company in China. My test was to assess, as best as I could, which company was receiving the distribution receipts from China, and to assign that company as the American distributor of record for the purposes of this study.
During the 18-month study period, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros and Disney each exported 7 or more films to China, while Fox placed just 4 films there and Universal only 3. The ability to obtain quota slots has been a key factor separating the most financially successful studios in China from the least successful ones.
Also important, of course, is the relative box office drawing power of each American studio’s films with Chinese audiences. On that score Paramount was also the leader with an average of $59 million per release, while Sony brought up the rear among major studios with barely a third of that figure, at $23 million per release.
Another useful measure to examine is China indexing, that is, the share of total worldwide box office earned by each company’s films in China. This figure tells us how ‘China friendly’ each company’s slate has been; the higher the number, the greater the China appeal. By this measure Twentieth Century Fox, with its out-sized China release of Titanic, led the way. Had it not been for Titanic, Paramount would have led on this score too.
When the studios started making the films that are the subject of this study, it’s unlikely that any of them were thinking much about China. But the world has changed in the past two years. Given China’s rapid emergence, all of the studios will need to fully incorporate China into their strategies for developing, producing and distributing their global films. While the film genres, their stories, and their overall suitability for China are all important, of equal or even greater importance are the studios’ continued access to distribution, and the effectiveness of the marketing and releasing of their films. Toward this end, co-producing movies with Chinese partners will become an increasingly important tactic for American companies to enhance their standing and to exercise greater control over their results in the PRC.
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.
chinafilmbiz 中国电影业务 