Tag Archives: Prometheus

Daniel Radcliffe Starrer ‘Woman in Black’ Falls Flat in Soft Week at Chinese Box Office

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By Robert Cain for China Film Biz

September 25, 2012

Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe couldn’t bring his magic to the China debut of his horror vehicle The Woman in Black, and two new Chinese language releases—Great Rescue and That Year School Ended—failed to connect as China’s box office take slipped last week to $29 million, its lowest level since March.

Although the last four Harry Potter films were solid hits in China, that franchise’s popularity failed to carry over to Woman in Black, which suffered one of the year’s worst openings for an English language film, with $1.45 million in receipts over its first four days. Among 2012’s nearly 50 English language releases so far, only The Lincoln Lawyer, The King’s Speech, A Man Apart and Ninja have fared worse.

Horror still hasn’t firmly established itself as a reliable genre in China. A few modest Chinese language successes like Bunshinsaba ($9.5 million total), Blood Stained Shoes ($7.2 million), and 2011’s Mysterious Island ($14 million), have been outnumbered by flops. It may be that Chinese audiences haven’t yet caught on to the pleasures of a good scary movie, but it’s more likely that the problem lies in China’s censorship strictures, which don’t allow much room for a true horror film, with blood, gore, torture, ghosts, demons, and “excessively terrifying scenes” all strictly prohibited.

On a brighter note for Chinese filmmakers, White Deer Plain out-grossed The Expendables 2 to take the week’s number one spot, the first time in a month that a Chinese film has taken that honor. Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and the Amazing Spider-Man, all nearing the end of their PRC runs, rounded out the rest of the top five.

Business should be brisk next week as six new Chinese films and the U.S.-China co-pro Looper will open just ahead of October’s Golden Week holiday. Look for the Stephen Fung steampunk comedy Taichi 0 to lead the pack, with China’s divas Zhang Ziyi in Dangerous Liaisons and Fan Bingbing in Double Xposure giving Taichi 0 some serious competition, especially with their female audience appeal. Although Looper’s Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt don’t have major fanbases in China, that movie’s genre, action-SciFi, tends to over-perform in China, so don’t count it out.

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

Spider-Man, Dark Knight Power China’s 2nd Best Ever Box Office Week

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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