North American audiences stay home
Even as trade tensions are mounting between the United States and China, the importance of Chinese moviegoers to Hollywood has never been more apparent.
Global movie-going reached a record high of $40.6 billion in 2017 despite a downturn in audiences at North American theatres, the Motion Picture Association of America said Wednesday in its annual report. That was despite the lowest attendance at domestic theatres in 22 years.
Instead, the growth was largely propelled by China, which accounted for $7.9 billion in ticket sales in 2017.
That fuelled a seven per cent increase in the overseas box office. U.S. and Canada ticket sales by comparison totalled $11.1 billion, down two per cent. If not for a four per cent increase in the average ticket price to $8.97, the drop would have been worse.
But after briefly stalling in 2016, the needle is going the other direction in China.
“The Chinese film market is going to be the largest film market in short order,” said Charles H. Rivkin, the former assistant secretary of state who in January took over for Christopher Dodd as MPAA chairman. “They’re building about 25 screens a day.”
The shift has in many ways already begun.
For the first time, the Chinese movie market overtook North America in the first quarter of 2018.”
Several big Hollywood blockbusters such as Steven Spielberg ’s Ready Player One, Pacific Rim Uprising and Tomb Raider, debuted bigger in China than in the U.S. and Canada.
The growing importance of Chinese movie theatres to Hollywood comes at a sensitive time for relations between the two countries. In response to moves by the Trump administration, China on Wednesday unveiled proposed tariffs on numerous American products, rocking the stock market and stoking fears of a larger trade war.
Restrictions on film imports to China are already considerable for Hollywood; the country caps foreign films at 34 per year.
While pessimism often abounds about the future of the theatrical business in North America, due in part to digital upstarts such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple, the MPAA sought to paint a more optimistic picture. Among the statistics trotted out by the report: more than three-quarters of the U.S. and Canada population — 263 million people — went to movie theatres at least once in 2017. The gender split of audiences was exactly 50-50.