Year ends with ‘Operation Red Sea’ outranking other hit films
BEIJING: Despite a year marked by blockbuster revenues, the Chinese film market is seeing low growth as audience tastes change.
As of Monday, the highestearning film of the year is Operation Red Sea with 3.65 billion yuan (RM2.22 billion), followed by Detective Chinatown 2 (3.40 billion yuan) and Dying to Survive (3.10 billion yuan).
Only four imported films entered the top 10 this year, among them only Avengers: Infinity War (2.39 billion yuan) broke into top five.
Statistics on Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan provide further evidence that Chinese films are faring well against imported competition, 29 of the top 50 highest-earning films of the year were domestic films.
While Hollywood films have been the “poster child” for films imported into China for years, Indian films were an important part of this year’s box office. A total of nine Indian films have been released in Chinese mainland cinemas so far this year, with one more, Thugs of Hindostan, due out on Friday. This number is almost three times that of 2017.
Looking at the box office performance of Indian films in China, four raked in more than 100 million yuan, not a bad feat considering that prior to 2017 Indian films rarely made more than 10 million yuan.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Chinese mainland box office had brought in a total of 59.39 billion yuan (RM36.2 billion). With just a few days to go, that’s over three billion more than the 55.9 billion yuan earned last year. While this is mere steps away from the 60 billion yuan goal predicted by media at the beginning of the year, this year’s record just doesn’t seem that worth celebrating.
The Chinese film industry got off to a good start in the beginning of the year, but experienced tough times in the following months.
In February, the month of the Chinese New Year holiday, three films managed to pull in two billion yuan each, pushing the monthly box office to 10.15 billion yuan.
However, looking at the rest of the year, monthly box-office revenue dropped below four billion on six occasions.
“With the rising quality of domestic films, hit films came one after another… but when huge audiences are drawn to these hit films, the rest suffer a bigger crash,” wrote Yingyi Dushe (Poisonous Words on Film), a Chinese WeChat public account, citing statistics from film database EntGroup.
“In 2017, the top 10 films accounted for 36.4 per cent of the total box office. But in 2018, that percentage has risen to 42.4 per cent,” it added.
Compared with previous years when popular stars and well-known IPs were the biggest draws for films, the concept of “content is king” has become more widely accepted.
On Sohu Entertainment’s list of the top 10 financial flops of the year, many were big budget films that failed to bring in audiences with their big-name star casts.
Fantasy film Asura is the most outstanding example.
With a rumoured budget of 750 million yuan, the blockbuster starring A-list actor Tony Leung and actress Carina Lau, as well as pop star Wu Lei tanked.
Asura ended up only earning 50 million yuan at the box office and was dropped after only three days.